West Yorkshire Playhouse is showing a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand‘s swashbuckling play Cyrano. Rose Crees gives her take on this energetic drama…

Cyrano is a buoyant and fanciful re-adaption of the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, which creatively and energetically combines the essence of a French debonair with a quintessential sense of Yorkshire. Adapted from its original French by Deborah McAndrew, it eloquently fuses the poetic romance of the renaissance of 1640 with thoroughly accessible humour. Brought together by Conrad Nelson’s direction and performed by Northern Broadsides in partnership with The New Vic, Cyrano is thoroughly uplifting, entertaining and reflective. Following the adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac, a suave and epigrammatic soldier played by Christian Edwards, who strives for the love of his cousin, Roxanne (Sharon Singh), only to be hindered by his offensively gargantuan nose, we experience extreme sorrow, humour and poetic soliloquies.

‘The performance subtly slides between elegant verse and rugged humour, brought by its northern company’

The performance subtly slides between elegant verse and rugged humour, brought by its northern company. There is an element of the deliberately theatrical and poetic as the performance itself revels in the joy of the theatrical – the music is provided by the cast’s own playing and the characters themselves take the opportunity to act their feelings out in stages of the play. Cyrano’s world really is one of ‘panache’, a word which was brought into the English language by this play. The panache of the play’s translation, direction and performance suggests we as an audience should seize life with such flamboyance.

Cyrano is a joy to watch and does not become stagnant due to its constant movement from song to poem to swordfight. From the request for audience members to switch off their phones (delivered in a French-Yorkshire accent), to Cyrano’s staunch refusal to die in the final scene, the play emphatically involves us in the antics of Cyrano and his Parisian contemporaries. Through verse and passionate performance, we see past his nose and into his poetic persona.

Rose Crees

(Image courtesy of West Yorkshire Playhouse)