CYRANO DE BERGERAC. To 19 October.

Southampton

CYRANO DE BERGERAC
by Edmond Rostand translated and adapted by Anthony Burgess

Nuffield Theatre To 19 October 2002
Mon-Thu 7.30pm Fri-Sat 8pm Mat 4pm 19 October
Audio-described 16 October
Signed 17, 19 matinee
Runs 3hr 10min One interval

TICKETS 023 8067 1771
Review Hazel Brown 1 October

Simon Robson’s fine performance as the eponymous hero has real panache. This play lives or dies in the hands of the actor playing Cyrano, a comic braggart and incurable romantic who lives life to the full, but whose vulnerability means he ends as a tragic figure. Simon Robson plays him with relish, huge panache and real feeling: from his dramatic entrance to destroy the mannered actor Montfleury, to the final death scene. Cyrano’s love of words and poetry mean that he has many long speeches, which Robson succeeds in making comic, heroic, telling and touchingly romantic. And he is no mean swordsman either. His towering performance carries this long play through at a pace that never flags and engages the audience’s sympathies at every turn.

Made vulnerable by his huge nose, Cyrano is prepared to defend himself with his most potent weapons, words and the sword, but, terrified of rejection, he is unable to declare his love for his cousin, the beautiful Roxane. However, when he learns that she has fallen in love with a handsome young soldier, he helps the young couple to come together by supplying the words of love she craves, that the country bumpkin, Christian, is unable to think of for himself.

Elisabeth Dermot Walsh’s Roxane is no shy, retiring beauty and, when she arrives on the battlefield of Arras, she sparkles with pleasure at her daring. Martin Hutson plays Christian as a straightforward and likeable young man whose tragedy is the realisation that it is words and not looks that are the most potent weapon in the armoury of love. The scenes between these three maintain a dramatic tension that is initially funny and ultimately tragic.

Set against a backdrop of Paris and France in the seventeenth century, this production suggests the sweep and brilliance of society at every level, from the Machiavellian aristocracy to the mannered fops; from poetic pastry cooks to exhausted fighting men, from tawdry theatre life to the consolation of the veil. Using simple and adaptable props, the scenes are changed rapidly and the over-three hour length slips by with real pleasure.

Usherette/Lise (Ragueneau’s wife): Clare Perkins
Cavalryman/Valvert (the Fop)/Capt. Carbon de Castel Jaloux: John Sackville
Musketeer/Ligniere (the drunken Poet)/Montfleury (the Actor)/Capuchin Monk: Blair Plant
Citizen/Roxane’s Duenna (later Sister Marthe): Juliet Prew
Pickpocket/Le Bret (Cyrano’s friend): Will Knightley
Christian: Martin Hutson
Ragueneau (the Pastry Cook): David Alcock
Roxane: Elisabeth Dermot Walsh
Comte de Guiche: Christopher Bowen
Cyrano de Bergerac: Simon Robson

Director: Patrick Sandford
Designer: Juliet Shillingford
Lighting: David W Kidd
Music Arrangement/Composer: Malcolm Newton
Fight director: Kate Waters
Youth & Community Director: Fran Morley

2002-10-10 12:01:48