Jamie Lloyd’s Cyrano de Bergerac

I found Jamie Lloyd’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac at Brooklyn Academy of Music both exhilarating and exhausting. It clocked in at nearly three hours and I suspect the text at a normal conversational speed might have run closer to four. Jamie Lloyd is especially known for his bare-bones productions of Pinter (one of which I saw in London several years ago), and this production was similarly bare bones—not as obvious a choice for staging Rostand as it is for Pinter.

The action takes place within a spare wooden box placed under the Harvey’s large proscenium arch. Steps and a few chairs constitute the set and the costumes are casual modern dress. But there is, perhaps, one decorative touch. One of the actors begins to write letters backwards on the back wall. He very slowly writes out an unintelligible series of letters, and eventually fills in the missing letters to spell out: “I love words. That’s all.”

The focus on words, on brilliant intellectual wordplay is, as I say, exhilarating. It is even more exhilarating to see the intelligence of Roxanne, who in this version is more a Beatrice looking for her intellectual equal than a frivolous girl demanding that her suitor court her with poetry. It makes a particularly striking contrast to the recent movie with Peter Dinklage. Much as I loved Dinklage and the movie’s choice to foreground dwarfism rather than a ridiculous nose, I was sorely disappointed by the lack of wit and intellectual bite in the movie. The whole thing devolved into a bit of a sentimental mess.

Here, the modernized text maintains the language about a nose, but James McAvoy’s face is unadorned. And he is, strikingly, the most handsome man on stage. But still it works because he convincingly portrays a man paralyzed by insecurity. Paralyzed, but also galvanized by a kind of rage. He cannot express his love for Roxanne—and is it compensation for that inadequacy that makes his wordplay, like his swordplay, so clearly an act of aggression?

The production is saying something here about toxic masculinity, I suppose, but I would rather try to communicate the feel of this tragic hero. And in this version he is a tragic hero, not Rostand’s romantic hero. There’s plenty of comedy, to be sure, but McAvoy also grabs hold of us both emotionally and intellectually from the start and never lets us go, whether it’s through his brilliant witticisms in the first scene, his whisper-soft confession of (purportedly Christian’s) love to Roxanne near the end of Act I, or his dying gasp: “The hero should have the last … should have … the hero … should have … the last …” BLACKOUT