Cyrano De Bergerac (Southwark Playhouse)
The best you can say of this trite skitter through a great play, adapted from Edmond Rostand by Glyn Maxwell, is that it gives you the outline if you don't know it and gives you the creeps if you do.
The irrepressible Kathryn Hunter leads an all-female ensemble of eight as the long-nosed swordsman, a gender-biased tactic of director Russell Bolam that is no more successful than the Globe's idea over a decade ago of subverting the macho-ness of The Taming of the Shrew with a bunch of wild women, or casting Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero.
If you don't want Cyrano to be about the nobility of love, the genius of poetry, the courtliness of 17th century "panache" and the magnificence of melodrama, then you're better off either leaving it alone or watching the Gérard Depardieu movie to put you right.
Cyrano, handicapped with a huge honker, is impossibly in love with his beautiful cousin Roxane who, in turn, is in love with a witless soldier, Christian; at the wars, Cyrano plays Pander by writing love letters to Roxane in Christian's name. There's no happy ending.
Nor is there a happy beginning at Southwark. The convent of the last act is the setting of the first: the nuns are "putting on a play" and handing out Ragueneau the baker's madeleines in the audience. Rostand's first act is also a theatrical set-up, but in a great hall, where Cyrano suffers taunts and insults before skewering a popinjay in a fusillade of devastating poetry and, literally, rapier wit.
There's absolutely nil sense of the power of language here – even Ragueneau's hilarious speeches are cut to ribbons – which matters even more than the absence of valour, bravery and self-sacrifice. Hunter does have a white plume, her "panache," and she has a wiry, corkscrew intensity at times, glaring down a carrot-like papier mâché proboscis.
But the performance is that of a little she-devil, not a chivalrous magnifico who is also, like David Bowie, the man who fell to earth, a poet and philosopher, a sexual experimentalist and a style-setter. Hunter's Cyrano is at best a games player, and Maxwell's "jokes" – "That's d'Artagnan – he's got three friends"; "We're fresh out of baguettes," "Let them eat cake" – on that same low level.
The style of acting is suitably playful – bamboo sticks for both swords and musketry at the siege of Arras – but also too simpering. Surely the climactic encounter between Sabrina Bartlett's anodyne Roxane and Ellie Kendrick's studiously blank Christian was a chance to release some sort of radical erotic charge in this version; but the former's "I would love you if you had a nose like Cyrano" doesn't even brush against phallic fantasy.
The greatest Cyrano of our day, Derek Jacobi in Anthony Burgess's superb translation for the RSC, reached for the stars (whence he came) and broke all hearts. Even the least of productions must establish the fifteen year break before the last act. Here, they just announce it and, instead of arriving at last in the convent, we're just exactly where we started.
Cyrano De Bergerac runs at Southwark Playhouse until 19 March.
