Lloyd’s production delights in the music of voices – coupled with the Ringham brothers’ sound design and Vaneeka Dadhria’s beatboxing – it continually underscores the fact that this play is, as much as anything, an impassioned love letter to the power of words.
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Writers are fighters and the word is everything in this firecracker show about passion, rejection, and the crazy genius of the spoken word. The rapiers, intrigue and censorship of Cardinal Richelieu’s Paris, circa 1640, are modernised as razor-sharp banter about love, sex, and – nudge, wink – cultural appropriation.
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If anything, this breathtakingly thrilling production by Jamie Lloyd - and the tour-de-force central performance by James McAvoy as the eponymous, big-nosed soldier-poet - have only become deeper and richer since the 2019 premiere. Maybe the last two years have made its themes of separation and loss more profound.
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It’s a daringly contemporary re-working which will be remembered for one of the most imposing performances of the decade. [However] the slackening of pace in the second half was unmistakable.
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Don’t mention the nose. That’s the warning offered to anyone in the vicinity of Cyrano de Bergerac, who, in James McAvoy’s fiercely charismatic portrayal, is a powder keg of a man: one quip about his legendarily large proboscis and he’s apt to explode.
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I wouldn't necessarily want all my classics to be delivered in this way, but Lloyd's company is committed to attracting a youthful audience...
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But I found myself gradually warming to this radical deconstruction of Rostand’s heroic comedy and totally captivated by James McAvoy’s performance as the swaggering Gascon.
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James mcavoy radiates charisma...Yes there are times when Lloyd’s production feels like it’s striving too hard to generate a hip, post-Hamilton vibe, but it tempers this with a sense of humour.
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