She’s very quickly flummoxed by the disparity between Christian’s in-person vapidity and the gorgeous richness of the poetry he sends her. In the play’s greatest dramatic flourish, Cyrano impulsively offers to ghostwrite Christian’s love letters to Roxane, whom he also loves. When an attractive airhead, Christian (Eben Figueiredo), enlists and falls mutually head over heels with Cyrano’s cousin Roxane, the poet warrior finds himself caught in the middle.

He’s also a champion fighter, the leader of a regiment of the French army. © Marc Brenner.Ĭyrano is an explosive poet-in this rendering, the “all-time crazy genius of the spoken word”-who masks his physical insecurities with a confidence fueled by his verbal dexterity. Evelyn Miller, Eben Figueiredo, and James McAvoy in Cyrano de Bergerac. But the essential element, Rostand’s fierce belief in the power of the word to transform, comes through with startling clarity. Those unfamiliar with the play-and thus unable to imagine the scenes fully staged for themselves-may find themselves lost.

Sometimes, especially when Crimp’s modern vocabulary strains in his attempts to generate direct translations of Rostand’s lengthy monologues, the simplicity gives way to sluggishness. Cyrano’s famous opening verbal attack on the sneering aristocrat Valvert (Nari Blair-Mangat) proceeds with the pulsating venom of a diss track: “Look he’s just a poor little rich boy arsehole/Brought up in mummy and daddy’s family castle,” Cyrano’s verse cascades, the occasionally plebeian rhymes elevated in James McAvoy’s spitfire brogue.īy reducing the play’s grandeur to the scope of a lightly staged radio play (even the sounds of war come from the mic of a beatboxer, Vaneeka Dadhria), words become the principal protagonist. This is not that.Ĭyrano de Bergerac has been reimagined here as a poetry slam with Martin Crimp’s irreverent adaptation transforming the rhythms of Rostand’s French verse into contemporary spoken word. Lloyd, who directed a star-studded New York production of Betrayal in 2019, is no stranger to Edmond Rostand’s late 19th-century play, having staged a traditional translation in period dress on Broadway in 2012. production that was originally scheduled to premiere at BAM in 2020. Played with glorious aliveness and vast emotional intelligence by Evelyn Miller, this Roxane is the crowning reason to see Jamie Lloyd’s inventive but sometimes stagnant reimagining of Cyrano de Bergerac, a transfer of a U.K. Bandied about by the various buffoons who desire her, she remains frustrated by the mores of 1640s France that ensure her underappreciation: “I am so, so bored with not being taken seriously by men,” she sighs, but it’s clear how seriously she takes herself. Everyone adores Roxane-for her beauty, at first glance, but then for her ferocious intellect.

Cyrano de bergerac martin crimp