THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Edmond Rostand; in a new version by Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson
Noel Coward Theatre, 85-88 St Martin's Lane, London, WC2N 4AU until September 5, 2026
Rostand’s classic of the French theatre has taken a bit of a battering in London of late. First there was Jamie Lloyd’s hip hop version with a snarling James MacAvoy channeling Elvis in his black leather trousers and now this, where director and adapter Simon Evans working with the Grime poet and ‘professional raver’ Debris Stevenson, have also lost sight of what made the original special in their striving to make it ‘relevant’ or current.
First performed on the thrust stage of the Swan in Stratford last winter, Evans expansive production makes full use of boxes, the stalls, and the circles in breaking down the ‘fourth wall’ and engaging with the audience. There is also excellent use of music with the comic device of Cyrano being followed everywhere by a traveling troupe of 6 actor-musicians who provide an often-witty soundtrack score to his emotions.
The reason to see it is Adrian Lester, one of our great classical actors now. Here he manages to perfectly balance the swagger of the soldier Cyrano with the self-loathing of a romantic soul stymied by self-consciousness about his one physical limitation – his nose. Haunted by his appearance, he’s been in love with Roxane since they were children, but his insecurities mean he will never tell her.
For adapters, finding a modern idiom for the Alexandrine rhyming couplets of the 1897 play is the first hurdle. Here they have cleverly assigned different metres and vocabularies to different characters so that the poet Cyrano’s are more complex while the farm boy Christian, with whom Roxanne is besotted, relies on more non-Latinate words. It is excellent endeavor.
While Levi Brown brings a naïve charm to the handsome Christian he also gives him a regional accent and a far too cocky demeanor, so he comes across rather like a Brummie Buttons from the panto rather than the handsome dullard he’s meant to be.
Similarly, Susannah Fielding’s Roxanne is no nonsense to the point of being conceited and dripping in sarcasm. In the scene where she and her women friends follow the men to the battlefield disguised as nuns they banter like a hen party setting off for a night out. She – in Mother Superior guise remember – at one moment even screams “just bloody knock”.
Grace Smart’s costumes add to the confusion. There’s a trend of late to studiously avoid being true to the more flamboyant historical periods. Instead, there’s a compromise made, especially for the women, where long dresses and flounces are cast aside in favor of making the women look commanding in modern attire. This is fine, but you go the whole hog and set it today. Here they ,don’t and what we get instead is a colorless melange of styles that look like they’ve come off jumble sale rack. This is set in the 17th century, it’s the RSC, it could be beautiful as many previous productions of it have been.
The visuals may be just one aspect, but it typifies the confusion of tone here. The sudden shift from the light comedy of Act One to the somber battlefields of Act Two also doesn’t help, but the jarring tone here and obvious lack of jeopardy means you lose purchase on the characters. At nearly 3 hours it also has its longueurs. In short the characters are not believable as 17th century and are grating as 21st century. This also means that the dramatic highlight of the climactic scene, where Roxanne discovers the truth and bemoans her fate, lacks any dramatic punch because the emotion for it hasn’t been earned.
Lester is a great classical actor but he’s at sea here in a confused and confusing production which fatally lacks the one thing it needs – panache. It’s a useful introduction to the text if you’ve never seen it but it you really want to understand this watch the Depardieu movie version from 1990.
