Adrian Lester on the sweet smell of success in 'Cyrano de Bergerac'

Adrian Lester made his long-awaited RSC debut last year in Cyrano de Bergerac. Now the show — and that famous bulging nose — is heading to the West End.

Summary

• Adrian Lester is reprising his role in Simon Evans's production of Cyrano de Bergerac
• The actor is known for his great Shakespearean roles on stage as well as screen credits such as Hustle and Riviera
• He stars in Cyrano alongside Susannah Fielding

Bringing Cyrano de Bergerac to the years of talking”, according to its star Adrian Lester. Simon Evans’s production of the classic 19th-century French play was first placed under the nose of the Hustle and Riviera actor about 10 years ago. Lester was bouncing between projects and had a quick flick through the script, but it wasn’t until a chance meeting with Evans at a friend’s dinner party, in which the pair discussed their shared love of theatre, that he agreed to sign on.

Lester was impressed with Evans’s “unconventional” approach to projects, citing his 2017 production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Donmar Warehouse, starring Lenny Henry, which kept “reinventing the rules”. He thought that Evans’s directorial eye applied to Cyrano could be something truly exciting. But the timing wasn’t right. Another production of Cyrano with James McAvoy was already waiting in the wings and then Covid hit, bringing conversations to a standstill. Until the Royal Shakespeare Company stepped in.

“It’s interesting that I go to the RSC after all these years,” says Lester of his debut at the Swan Theatre in 2025, ahead of the play’s transfer to the Noël Coward Theatre in June. The star has worked extensively across screen and stage, with leading roles in Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet, Othello, and Henry V. “People think I’ve worked at the RSC because I’ve done Shakespeare before. But the first time I work there, I don’t actually do any Shakespeare. I do a French classic.”

The play in question is Edmond Rostand’s tale about a man named Cyrano, who is hopelessly in love with his cousin Roxane, but cannot admit his feelings because of shame surrounding his large and unsightly nose. When Roxane develops feelings for the handsome, yet simple, nobleman Christian, Cyrano writes passionate love letters on behalf of his rival, allowing him to express his feelings secretly.

“The part has got everything, that’s why it’s so meaty,” says Lester. “There’s wit, humour, philosophy, sincerity, emotional veracity, unrequited love. There’s fighting, for the boy soldier in us all. It’s a well-rounded, beautiful role.”

It’s exhausting, too. Apart from one change and the interval, Lester is on stage for the entirety of the play’s 2 hours and 30 minutes runtime. “The energy it takes to go through the battles, the love, the comedy, and the emotional stuff at the end, and do that twice a day. I was surprised by how tired I got at the end of the first week, and realised ‘oh, you’ve really got to manage this.’”

Alongside mastering co-adaptor and poet Debris Stevenson’s modern verse, Lester was also enrolled in what he calls “sword bootcamp”, as he got to grips with Bethan Clark’s fight choreography. Lester took to the challenge with relish — “It’s like martial arts, but with a weapon,” he says excitedly — yet even with the swords being blunted after performances, he and his sparring partner Matt Mordak (who played Valvert in the RSC run, and returns for the West End) had to be cautious because the swords would sharpen through use during the fight sequences.

Lester felt it was important to interrogate the play anew, specifically the need for Roxane to have a voice. “Debris and Simon really dug into those parts and decided, ‘okay, we’re going to change things.’ And so we have a Cyrano that answers all of the little bumps that the original has within it. We’ve removed them, smoothed them, and made them more complex and human, until we’ve come to the production that we have today.”

Lester also had strong feelings about how to tackle the play’s famous nose. “With Cyrano, size does matter,” he says, explaining that he didn’t want “a pretty Pinocchio nose because that lends itself to commedia dell’arte”. Unlike modern productions such as Jamie Lloyd’s Cyrano and Virginia Gay’s 2024 queer retelling, which entirely did away with the huge nose, Lester wanted something “big and bulbous”, adding pockmarks around his nose and forehead to increase Cyrano’s feeling of ugliness.

“It taps into the idea of everyone else having their own nose,” he says. “Cyrano is absolutely insistent that he’s a ridiculous laughing stock. He’s not worth loving because of this thing on his face. I think some people do feel like that in front of the people they love. They feel like they’re not worthy. And we touch on that.”

Lester believes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but agrees that society also has a large role in determining who we do and don’t find appealing. “Physical attraction is something that is formed and mutable and shifts,” he says. “In some cultures having a long neck is physically attractive. In other cultures having a big belly is physically attractive. Women with wider hips, who are bigger, and so on.”

While Lester’s own nose is perfectly in proportion, he notes that he draws on other personal experiences to capture Cyrano’s sense of alienation. “I grew up in Birmingham in the 1980s, so I will leave you to use your imagination about the othering and the microaggressions,” he reveals. “That’s a bag of experiences where I have definitely thought, ‘oh, I know how it feels for everyone else to be living in one reality and then you and your family are living in a different reality.’”

Lester began his acting journey at Birmingham Youth Theatre when he was 14, and instantly knew that performance was something he wanted to pursue. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1989, and has consistently worked across film, TV, and theatre ever since, maintaining a notoriously strong work ethic across an impressive range of roles and projects. How has he managed to resist the pressures of being typecast?

“I’m interested in making myself the best kind of actor I can. I’ve seen so many actors shrink and become one thing, and I’m not interested. Maybe it’s to my detriment, maybe I’m not interested in playing the one guy who has the one accent, with the one set of mannerisms, in the one type of drama.” Lester’s determination to always push himself to try new things is one of the reasons he signed on for Cyrano, as it gave him the opportunity to experiment with farce for the first time in his career.

He continues, “I’ve always wanted to stretch myself and when I’ve finished doing one type of role then I’ve always wanted to do something else.” To the delight of theatre fans everywhere, Lester says that means hopefully returning to a musical some time soon. Early in his career, he starred in both Sweeney Todd and the 1996 Donmar Warehouse revival of Sondheim’s Company. “After Cyrano, I have a strong feeling that I want to sing. I’ve been talking about it for a while. I can feel it in my bones,” he says.

Lester would also love to play Macbeth, King Lear or, specifically, Prospero. Why Prospero? “The creation of magic, the protection of his daughter, the vengeance and the revenge that’s driving him, that whole journey. I would really love to explore that. And I feel like Simon Evans is the right director to do it because if anyone understands magic, he does.”

After nearly 40 years in the industry, Lester’s passion is still very much evident. Reflecting again on Cyrano, he believes its message is to “love deeply, love honestly, and love hard. And take the scars home with you as part of your growth. If you protect yourself from being uncomfortable, then you won’t develop a resilience in conversation, in love, or at work. Being uncomfortable is good. Being scared is good. Having scars because you tried is good. It reminds us of what it’s like to be human.”

Lester takes a breath, before quipping: “I’m really on my soap box today.”

Book Cyrano de Bergerac tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

This article first appeared in the May 2026 issue of London Theatre Magazine.

Photo credit: Adrian Lester in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Swan Theatre. (Photo by Marc Brenner). Inset: in Hustle, Cyrano with Susannah Fielding, and Henry V. (Photos by Brenner and Tristram Kenton)