There are productions that begin when the curtain rises.
There are productions that begin with an actor entering.
And then there are productions that kick open the doors of the theatre, seize the audience by the neck and announce: dear, you are no longer merely watching.
Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson’s Cyrano de Bergerac belongs emphatically to the third category.
From the very beginning, Christian Patterson’s Ragueneau appears not simply to welcome us but to initiate us into the conspiracy. “The world out there, us quiet in here.”
It is the theatrical equivalent of Magritte painting a pipe and then politely informing us that, no, it is not a pipe. Except here the joke is even better: the theatre tells us that it is separate from the world while simultaneously dismantling the wall between the two.
And then — bang — the theatre becomes a playground.
Actors arrive through the auditorium, materialise in balconies, invade boxes, appear where respectable actors have no business appearing.
The whole building seems to have developed a nervous system. One moment we are spectators; the next, we are extras in a Fellini film, wondering whether the person sitting three seats away is actually part of the cast.
There is something wonderfully baroque about it.
The production behaves as if the theatre had been designed by Bernini after three espressos and a nervous breakdown.
Space is no longer architecture; it is choreography.
Entrances become trapdoors of imagination.
Balconies become balconies in every romantic film ever made.
The auditorium itself seems to have caught the fever of Cyrano.
It also makes perfect sense given the production’s origins in the Swan Theatre at Stratford: that intimate stage geometry where actors can look into your eyes, breathe almost in your lap and make the distinction between “audience” and “actor” deliciously unstable.
This is Cyrano as theatre confectionery: whipped cream, gunpowder, swords, poetry, desire and an alarming amount of nose.
The central question, of course, remains gloriously simple: do we fall in love with what we see or what we hear?
Cyrano sees himself as grotesque and therefore gives his words to Christian, who has the face but not the vocabulary.
Roxane hears one man and sees another. The voice belongs to Cyrano; the cheekbones belong to Christian.
It is essentially Renaissance portraiture crossed with Hollywood dubbing.
Titian might have understood it.
Hitchcock certainly would have.
And Adrian Lester understands it well.
Lester’s Cyrano is the production’s kinetics. He does not so much cross the stage as cut through it. He moves like a laser with excellent diction. His body seems perpetually to be finishing a sentence his mouth has not yet spoken. A hand floats; a shoulder turns; an arm extends into the air with the effortless elegance of a Degas dancer; and suddenly the enormous Cyrano becomes physically seductive.
Powell and Pressburger might have given him a staircase.
Busby Berkeley might have given him forty dancers.
Fellini would probably have given him a circus.
Lester needs none of them.
He has his body.
And that body is constantly contradicting Cyrano’s belief that he lacks physical allure. His movement becomes the beauty he imagines his nose has stolen from him.
And then there is the voice.
If Cyrano’s nose is his curse, his voice is his contraband.
The production gives its characters distinct speech patterns and accents, and these become almost musical signatures.
Christian is direct; Roxane fractures and interrupts; Cyrano ricochets between rhythms.
Nobody seems to be “doing poetry”.
Instead, poetry behaves like weather: it moves through the bodies.
Words become choreography.
Choreography becomes seduction.
Seduction becomes catastrophe.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, a band appears.
Not metaphorically.
A real band.
Cyrano has won them in a bet, and Josh Sneesby as Raphaël, Fergus Murphy as Étienne and Joe Butcher as Bastien, together with the other musicians, become a wonderfully unruly gang of theatrical accomplices.
They are not sitting decoratively at the side looking like musicians waiting for interval.
They play.
They watch.
They react.
They inhabit the action.
They are part Greek chorus, part cabaret orchestra, part Brechtian prank, part Jacques Demy dream sequence.
One half expects them to be wearing striped shirts and waiting for Catherine Deneuve to walk past on a bicycle.
Alex Baranowski’s score gives the production its bloodstream.
The music doesn't merely underline emotion like an obedient film soundtrack. It provokes it.
Childhood melodies appear like ghosts. Irish rhythms answer the actors. Music comments on desire. And when Cyrano conducts the band, Lester becomes for a few delicious seconds Karajan in a nose, commanding the orchestra of his own doomed heart.
It is absurd.
It is beautiful.
It is exactly right.
And then there is Scott Handy.
The Comte de Guiche enters as if he has been painted in oil, varnished, framed and then released from the National Portraits Gallery after closing time.
Handy has that particular quality so familiar from his RSC and Cheek by Jowl work: ethereal but passionate, refined but faintly dangerous, as if every sentence might be his last and every romantic disappointment a matter for the French Revolution.
He speaks almost through his teeth.
Not quite whispers.
Not quite hisses.
Something in between.
The words seem to slide out of his mouth with the sinuous movement of a snake discovering that aristocracy is an excellent disguise for venom.
The effect is gloriously creepy.
One can imagine Bronzino painting him: pale, elegant, immaculately composed, with the unmistakable expression of a man who has already arranged three assassinations before breakfast.
And Grace Smart’s costumes understand him perfectly.
That wig.
Those clothes.
That aristocratic silhouette.
Handy looks as though he has been cut directly from a seventeenth-century portrait and dropped rather inconveniently into the twenty-first century.
There is poetry in it.
Indeed, beneath the vanity, the entitlement and the increasingly desperate persistence of the refused suitor, Handy gives De Guiche something unexpectedly touching: the suggestion of a poet trapped inside the wrong painting.
He is a man who wants to be desired and cannot understand why desire refuses to obey rank.
For much of the play he seems almost boneless — an elegant aristocratic eel gliding from one humiliation to the next.
But then comes the final battle.
And suddenly:
spine.
The voice deepens.
The command returns.
The column straightens.
The wig acquires military authority.
The elegant snake becomes a soldier.
It is a tiny physical transformation with the force of a close-up in a Sergio Leone film. No speech is required. The body tells us what has happened.
The Comte has finally become a man.
Joseph Christain’s Edmond inhabits another cinematic universe altogether.
He can be menace, companion, comic relief and potential catastrophe in almost the same breath.
There is something wonderfully French-thriller about him: the man standing quietly in the corner who looks perfectly harmless until you realise that he probably knows where all the bodies are buried.
He has the quality of someone who might appear in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, smoke one cigarette, say seven words and completely alter the plot.
Philip Cumbus’s Le Bret is softer, warmer and somehow even more dangerous to the heart. He combines the tenderness of the deepest friend with the practical efficiency of someone who has been forced to become producer, therapist, military adviser and emergency administrator of Cyrano’s disastrous emotional life.
Le Bret has probably spent years saying, “Cyrano, please don't.”
Cyrano has probably spent years ignoring him.
Cumbus makes the friendship deeply affecting — while also possessing, frankly, an almost indecent amount of leading-man handsomeness. One suspects that British theatre has become structurally unfair.
Then there is the extraordinary visual grammar of the costumes.
Everyone seems to have escaped from a different painting.
De Guiche is lavish seventeenth-century aristocracy.
Roxane looks like Toulouse-Lautrec wandered into a contemporary fashion editorial and refused to leave.
Christian possesses the clean, handsome simplicity of a portrait before the painter has decided to ruin the sitter’s life.
And Cyrano — jeans, doublet, geekery, romanticism — looks as though a medieval knight has been forced to attend a Camden house party.
It should not work.
It works beautifully.
The costume becomes psychological x-ray.
And Susannah Fielding’s Roxane is positively radioactive.
She is flashing-eyed, volatile, funny and eventually devastating.
There is no passive princess here. She is a woman who believes she understands the difference between appearance and intelligence, only to discover that she has spent her life falling in love with a voice whose body was never where she thought it was.
She detonates.
It is closer to a Caravaggio conversion than a romantic revelation: suddenly the light changes and the entire moral architecture of the room is exposed.
And this is where the production's apparent frivolity reveals its deeper intelligence.
Because Cyrano is fundamentally a play about the violence of appearances.
Who gets to be beautiful?
Who gets to speak?
Who gets to be heard?
Who gets to hide behind another man's face?
Who gets to turn language into seduction?
Cyrano has the words but believes he lacks the face.
Christian has the face but lacks the words.
Roxane thinks she can distinguish the two.
De Guiche thinks power can purchase the heart.
Everyone is catastrophically wrong.
Which is excellent news for theatre.
Because theatre is precisely the place where the wrong body can speak the right words, where a costume can turn a man into a century, where six musicians can become an orchestra of memory, where a balcony can become Verona, Paris or the moon depending on the lighting, and where a man with an enormous fake nose can become more magnetic than half the cast of Bridgerton.
There are moments when the production perhaps luxuriates a little too enthusiastically in its own theatrical cleverness.
A joke about performance may occasionally put on a second hat.
A rhetorical flourish may arrive carrying another rhetorical flourish on its shoulders.
But ...this is Cyrano.
Subtlety was never exactly the point.
Rostand gives us swords and sonnets, noses and nobility, moonlight and martyrdom.
The play is essentially a Rococo chandelier that has learned to fence.
And Evans and Stevenson have understood that.
Their production does not polish the excess away.
It winds it up and lets it loose.
It is part Fellini circus, part French romantic film, part Renaissance portrait gallery, part Jacques Demy musical, part Caravaggio chiaroscuro, part Shakespearean playground and part very expensive nervous breakdown.
It races.
It sparkles.
It lunges.
It poses.
It kisses.
It stabs.
It sings.
And somewhere inside this glorious baroque machine, Scott Handy straightens his spine, Adrian Lester conducts his band, Roxane discovers the terrible truth, Christian discovers what it means to be more than a beautiful face, and the audience discovers that the theatre has been seducing us all along.
Perhaps that is the real trick of this Cyrano.
We arrive thinking we are here to decide whether people fall in love with what they see or what they hear.
By the end, we realise that we have fallen in love with what the theatre can make us see,
what it can make us hear,
and — most dangerously of all — what it can make us believe.
The world out there?
Quiet.
Us in here?
Absolutely hopeless.
By Giulia Dobre
London, The Noel Coward Theatre,
August 25th 2026.
#noelcowardtheatre
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#cyrano
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