Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Low Down
Virginia Gay’s new gender bending version of Cyrano is a joyous ripping up and remaking of the text. It’s an enjoyable romp with great production values and direction as well as fine performances, an entertaining hour with plenty of gags.
Review
Cyrano de Bergerac is a character we’re all familiar with from stage and film. Rostand’s swashbuckling, intelligent, articulate hero is thwarted in love by his huge proboscis, an unsightly nose that stops him from seeking love on his own account instead using his skill with words to intercede for his fellow soldier, Yan, brave and handsome, but hampered in his love for the lovely Roxanne by his inarticulacy.
Here, Virginia Gay’s new adaptation of Cyrano throws much of this up in the air and starts again to provide us with a gender flipped version with Cyrano, Yan and Roxanne in a queer love triangle with a background chorus of three characters hilariously giving commentary on the original text and stage directions to its main characters.
Virginia Gay plays the central character, a female Cyrano who dominates the action and the storytelling. What she doesn’t have is a huge nose – unlike many productions of the play there is no attempt to provide her with a fake proboscis. Nonetheless the jokes from the other characters about her nose flow freely.
Enter Roxanne, a spirited, feisty woman, played with energy and pizzazz by Jessica Whitehurst. She shares a love of words and poetry with Cyrano and in spite of their easiness around each other, only has eyes for the handsome Yan (Brandon Grace) who is completely tongue tied in her presence. And yet, suddenly he starts to woo her with fine words – not his own, of course, but those of Cyrano hovering in the background.
Meanwhile there is a chorus of three characters (Tessa Wong, David Tarkenter and Tarvi Virmani) loosely pulled from Rostand’s original who stand back from the action to interrogate the text and the characters’ actions, often to hilarious comic effect. David Tarkenter, in particular, is the perfect comic foil, with pitch perfect timing and sardonic tone.
The six strong cast give strong performances but Gay’s adaptation means that what they bring to the stage in meta analysis and comic effect, they lose in cohesion. The central love triangle loses something by Yan being depicted as being hot but dumb rather than brave but inarticulate.
It’s a joyous affair with jokes and perfectly timed physical humour aplenty. Claire Watson’s direction and Ana Beatriz Meireles, movement direction let the actors roam freely round the stage and its thrusts and into the auditorium. It’s full of action, energy and laughter and makes for enjoyable entertainment.
Deconstructing and reconstructing Rostand’s original text does offer some additional insights for our times around diversity and difference. However it is questionable, what if anything, changing the ending adds to the original. From a conflicted knotty original that raises questions and doesn’t yield easy answers, this adaptation of Cyrano lowers the tempo taking away the dramatic tension in favour of a happily ever after rom com ending.
Roast Production’s, Cyrano, premiered in Australia, and is premiering in Europe at the Traverse.
