'Cyrano de Bergerac' review — Adrian Lester is remarkable in this absolute triumph of a show

Read our review of Cyrano de Bergerac, now in performances at the Noël Coward Theatre to 5 September.

Summary

• Cyrano de Bergerac comes to the West End's Noël Coward Theatre
• Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson have adapted the play
• Adrian Lester is a superlative Cyrano

The theatre’s most celebrated nose is back, this time tethered to the superlative Adrian Lester who has brought to London the RSC revival of Cyrano de Bergerac that won raves at the Swan in Stratford last autumn. An RSC newcomer, Lester is part of an extraordinary uptick in casting at the RSC of late with Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman joining Kenneth Branagh next month in Warwickshire in The Cherry Orchard.

And how apposite Lester’s presence with this company indeed is. As one whose acquaintanceship with the RSC stretches back some while, I’m here to report that Lester is the best warrior-wooer I’ve come across since Derek Jacobi brought this same character to the Barbican late in 1983, at the time generating the first standing ovation for a play that I ever saw in London.

Nowadays such responses are commonplace but even so, Lester exists a breed apart and prompted from a preview audience the loudest roar I’ve heard since Rachel Zegler’s Eva Peron last summer.

Nor is this by any means a solo achievement. One of the abiding strengths of the production from Simon Evans – working from a terrific new script that he has fashioned with the poet-activist Debris Stevenson – is how generously it sees all this play’s characters in the round.

Susannah Fielding’s Roxane – the object of Cyrano’s passion not to mention this wordsmith’s celebrated pen – is no simpering bystander, but a woman possessed of agency and vibrancy who has been stung by love before and gets angry with Cyrano in their last-act encounter for having so fully concealed his feelings until it’s too late. (She’d make a fabulous Beatrice in Much Ado.)

Similarly Levi Brown's Christian, the amiable lunk who as often as not is an object of condescension within this play's central triangle, is here a likeable chap who does a good line in collective nouns and exists in partnership with Cyrano and not in a competition defined by either status or vocabulary.

And whereas the fashion with this work of late (check out Jamie Lloyd's two modernist versions of it either side of the pandemic) is to render its passions comparatively deadpan, Evans and co. play into the material's unabashed romance without once letting the abundant period trappings lead the text towards the sentimentality that was very much in the air when Edmond de Rostand was writing in 1897.

Working in conjunction with Grace Smart's surpassingly smart (sorry) design, Evans allows the action to flood the Noël Coward. Cyrano comes with a retinue of itinerant minstrels whom he can't shake (a running sight gag of its own), while the upper orders are crisply embodied by Scott Handy's Comte de Guiche, a supercilious nobleman who wields a sneer as if it were a sword.

The combat aspect of the play is richly served – Lester fields rapiers as deftly as he does rhetoric. And I for one won't soon forget the unexpected coup near the end where this man luxuriantly in love with language begins to lose the gift that has served him his entire life. That existence in turn finds physical representation in the appearance now and again of his younger self, the youth's innocence a million miles removed from the landscape of deception and disappointment that Cyrano will come to know. (Interestingly, in the modern era, the Christians of the world would simply ask AI to pen their love letters for them.)

But our hero's romantic fumblings make for as full-bodied an evening as one could wish for. Lester's historic Bobby in Company won him an Olivier some 30 years ago. Methinks it's time for an encore, in triumphant recognition of a poet shot through with what matters most in this play – panache.

Cyrano de Bergerac is at the Noël Coward Theatre to 5 September. Book Cyrano de Bergerac tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Cyrano de Bergerac (Photos by Marc Brenner)