"This is not your grand-mère’s 'Cyrano.' Replacing Rostand’s stately 12-syllable alexandrines with jumpier rhythms, its euphemisms with plain speech and its perfect rhymes with ones so slant they serve as italics, Crimp rockets the action to a world drunk on language as it’s actually spoken. It’s also a world in which, as the baker Ragueneau (now a poet, too) predicts, 'There’s going to be a new force of words.'"
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"Yup, you heard it. New York’s hottest ticket is a middle-aged white man rapping. That man is James McAvoy: booted and buzzcut like a Glaswegian squaddie and stripped to the waist. For nearly three hours he spits fire, spraying lyrical pearls at his enemies, nailing rap battles and chucking his battered heart beneath the feet of the woman he loves, Roxane."
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"Lloyd's 'Cyrano' lives comfortably in anachronism. Classics purists will still find the rhyming-couplet poetry of Rostand’s play intact, but Martin Crimp's freewheeling adaptation will also delight the Gen-Z crowd: 19th-century verse gives way to 21st-century spoken-word poetry and rap, including plenty of red-hot roasts. Think Hamilton, but faster (yes, it’s possible) and with no accompaniment but a single beatboxer (Vaneeka Dadhria)."
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"The Jamie Lloyd Company’s production was the pride of London in 2019. Lloyd is, for good and ill, a stylist, fond of precise stage choreography that fixes his actors into hieroglyphic friezes: When the 'curtain' (a plywood wall) flies up, the glowering company stands there, posed as if for a school picture — if every student wanted to kill you."
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"McAvoy's entire performance (done in his native Glaswegian dialect) has that quality: you want him to want you. That it's entirely in keeping with the text is a testament to both his mastery as an actor and Lloyd's as a director, and this brilliant mixture of celebrity star power, sex appeal, command of language, and just damn good acting will make you fall in love with the power of words all over again."
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It's a strange collection of debits and credits and how you might react to it is anyone's guess. If you love the original in all its florid glory, this determinedly caustic approach and frankly ugly design may prove fatally off-putting… If you wish to see a Belle Époque drama viewed through a 21st lens, revealing a poisonous sexual politics, this is the attraction for you. To my mind, Lloyd wrestles the play to a draw; his ideas are interesting, his results inconclusive.
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"It’s not only the physical production that’s stripped down. Lloyd stages many of the scenes with the actors facing front—almost concert-style—with military-precision blocking. It’s low-key and unfussy, and puts the spotlight squarely on the verse. (The very free, and very accessible, adaptation of Rostand’s text is by playwright Martin Crimp.) In case you were confused about the star of the show, just read the phrase on the back wall: 'I love words, that’s all.'"
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Playwright Martin Crimp, an adherent of the ”in-yer-face” school of British playwriting, has taken Edmond Rostand’s turn-of-the-last century verse drama, Cyrano de Bergerac, and not only blown off the cobwebs but exploded it into an entirely new 21st century experience. Staged by innovative director Jamie Lloyd, it has become a showcase for titanic Scottish stage and screen actor James McAvoy making an unforgettable New York stage debut in the title role as the 17th century poet and soldier.
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