This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe. Cyrano transfers to the Park Theatre for Christmas 2024.
This mischievous and somewhat maddening meta adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic verse play has gone down a storm in creator and star Virginia Gay‘s native Australia, and now it’s come o’erseas for a stint at the Fringe followed by one at London’s Park Theatre.
The best and most frustrating thing about ‘Cyrano’ is how luckily funny it is when Gay turns her mind to it. Away from the named characters, Tessa Wong, David Tarkenter and Tanvi Virmani are highly amusing as a trio of unnamed minor actors vocally confused about what they’re doing in this play. Bemused by the whole situation they bicker furiously and offer shambolic, often amusingly counterproductive advice to the leads.
In it, ‘Cyrano’ is repurposed as a queer love triangle, with both Gay’s female title character and Brandon Grace’s pretty but dumb-as-rocks Yan vying for the hand of Jessica Whitehurst’s feisty Roxanne. Gay doesn’t wear any prosthesis, but Cyrano’s nose is clearly meant to be big: the other characters discuss it in amusingly mortified tones. Whether it’s more meant to be an allegory for the barrier her sexuality presents to Roxanne I wasn’t entirely clear, but let’s say that’s the case but also an excuse for a few good nose gags.
Directed by Clare Watson, Gay’s show is at its best when it’s being spikily subversive, but too often it opts for mawkish sentimentality. Ultimately much of Gay’s innovation boils down to ‘wouldn’t it be great if “Cyrano” was turned into a nice story with a happy ending?’ And the thing is, I’m not really convinced it’s a performed enough play for that to seem like a subversive gesture, just a sentimental contrivance because Gay didn’t like the way it ended. Which is fine too, but I struggled to reconcile the gleefully silly humour – Virmani bursting into The Police song whenever anyone said ‘Roxanne’ got me every time – with the earnestness of modifications that are pretty much bowdlerisation.
It’s a shame because the company look like they’re having the time of their lives, and when ‘Cyrano’ isn’t getting all Hallmark Channel on us it’s usually being very funny. A frequently pleasurable journey, but I’m not convinced about the destination
