The scene in which Cyrano ventriloquizes for Christian has never felt so erotic, not only because of Cyrano’s rapture in delivering it but also because of Roxane’s in receiving it. I don’t mean to diminish the production’s emphasis on beauty, but it’s a more complicated kind of beauty than we’re used to. When at one point he thinks Roxane has summoned him to proclaim her love, his face flushes red with joy it’s the same red we see in his rages. For the first time in any version of “Cyrano” I’ve seen, the character’s improvisatory brio, his comradeliness, his violence and even his scheme for seducing his beloved by proxy are all tied together in an unpretty package.
It is therefore not incidental that McAvoy, who first played the role in an acclaimed London run interrupted by the pandemic, brings with him a cloud of superhero intensity from movie roles like Charles Xavier in the “X-Men” series. In his take on the role, Cyrano’s passion is almost secondary to a manic sense of entitlement, partly in response to his physical self-hatred (a bit of a stretch with McAvoy, but let’s allow him his private demons) and partly in response to what he has described, in an interview with Laura Collins-Hughes in The Times, as the production’s interest in “toxic masculinity.” Wielded by McAvoy, both are astonishing weapons. Another is that new words reveal new people. Is there ever! Which is but one of the reasons this production, superbly directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring James McAvoy in an almost literally ravishing performance, is a triumph. It’s also a world in which, as the baker Ragueneau (now a poet, too) predicts, “There’s going to be a new force of words.” This is not your grand-mère’s “Cyrano.” Replacing Rostand’s stately 12-syllable alexandrines with jumpier rhythms, its euphemisms with plain speech and its perfect rhymes with ones so slant they serve as italics, Crimp rockets the action to a world drunk on language as it’s actually spoken. “They say when he came through his mother’s vagina/the nose poked out first as a painful reminder.” Cyrano is now introduced rather differently: “Ah, good my lords, what a nose is his! When one sees it, one is fain to cry aloud, ‘Nay! ’tis too much!’”Īt any rate, one is fain to cry - because that’s unfortunately how the title character of “Cyrano de Bergerac” is usually introduced, both in the play’s first English translation, a year after its 1897 Paris premiere, and more or less ever since.īut in the version that opened at the BAM Harvey Theater on Thursday, “freely adapted” by Martin Crimp - so freely it almost amounts to a new play - the flowery phrases and antique diction of Edmond Rostand’s Belle Époque verse drama, at least as typically rendered in English, are finally fully swept away.