Cyrano (2022)
Having seen stage versions with Robert Lindsay and James McAvoy as well as the classic Gerard Depardieu movie, I was keen to see how this musical version compared.
First of all it is a musical — much more in a spoke-sung tradition so that it feels more like a play, with occasional, excellent background dancing!
The characters are great. Haley Bennett gets some guts as Roxanne — she’s an intelligent woman of letters (we see her in erudite literary salons), a woman in an impossible position — essentially being prostituted/sold by by her mother(?) to a horrible old, very rich Duke De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn). This maid/chaperone-like person always seems to be lurking in the background as Roxanne runs out of time and money. However she falls in love with new recruit to the local regiment Christian de Neuvillette (Kelvin Harrison Jr). Only her life-long protective and watchful family friend since childhood, Cyrano (Peter Dinklage) is secretly in love with her, and Christian is no good with words. Roxanne asks Cyrano to watch over his love rival, further complicating matters.
Kelvin Harrison Jr gave some oomph and compassion to love-lorn Christian and the battle between Christian and Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano de Bergerac for control of the words/voice made more desperate. He was charming, had a terrific singing voice and I found myself rooting for Team Christian to stay alive and not get out of the way to allow Cyrano and Roxanne to get together. It was heart-rending when he realised that Cyrano had been writing daily letters to Roxanne in his name, that Roxanne didn’t love him but Cyrano’s voice and essentially sacrificed himself to the enemy lines to allow them to be together. Or destroyed himself in hopelessness and despair.
Cyrano was a somewhat grumpy outsider here, though good with words, better at soldiering and fighting, and even better at annoying the pancaked faced fops he was forever encountering — in the theatre, in the streets…It’s suggested here that he almost dies of love even as he finds it, making the ending more tragic. The best moments came when Cyrano was impersonating Christian in the dark night beneath a balcony. Overall I think Peter Dinklage worked really hard to show us the person beneath all of this stuff dumped on him, combining heroism, romance and tragedy.
Ben Mendelsohn (despite channeling full Duke from Moulin Rouge and being buried alive underneath the thickest make-up, ridiculous rouging, frills and foppish wig) still made the most of it. He reluctantly dispatched the Gascons on a suicide mission against the enemy, which contained his enemies and was truly aghast when encountering Roxanne married to Christian. Nothing was more creepy than his kissing adieu to Roxanne on the tips of her fingers or his approach to see Roxanne whether she wanted him or not.
Haley Bennet as Roxanne had, at last a full personality, rather than being just a cypher and a pin-up. She was maybe a courtesan or actress (hard to tell) or wealthy lady of reduced means being forced to seek a good (i.e. rich and unloved) match. Nonetheless she was a woman of words (a deep inner thought life), of ideas, of literary ambitions, of salons, who seriously joked her way through life even as she was being pushed in impossible and unwanted situations. She used her imagination and literary ambitions to escape all the horrors coming at her.
Best of all her fashions, and pretty much the fashions of the whole cast, reflected the 18th century, whilst being stylised. We got the sense of a town built around a barracks, a wider sense of class and community. In a nice background scene a wealthier gentleman came down some steps, spotted a small boy begging, gave him some cash and rumpled his hair in feeling of compassion and to keep on going in life. This was just the background actors!
There were perhaps too many baking scenes! and the nun-baiting at the end ignored the times the play was set in, where (Enlightenment or not) everyone was religious to some extent. Some of the stylised costuming towards the end let the overall look down — such as the army scenes where they were draped in bits of rag rather than actual (albeit tattered) uniforms and Roxanne’s mother/bawd had appallingly unhistorical flat hair, also not shoved up under her mob cap. Roxanne could manage paniers/hoops and hair up — why not her very socially aware mother? The regiment looked good, but everyone (apart from Roxanne and the nuns) looked overly grubby — people did wash their linens and want to look clean in the past! Nor was everything so grey/brown /mud coloured — people of the past liked colour! and hair styles! and hair pins, showing off their status, if they could afford to, or respectability if they could not.
Having said that, Roxanne looks sublimely radiant in her widow’s weeds and the calm invoked, makes her not realising that Cyrano is dying as they banter on even sadder. They could have been a literary powerhouse, playwrights and poets together. As ever too, Joe Wright makes it all look stunning.
