Cyrano at the Traverse Theatre – Edinburgh Fringe review

What if Cyrano de Bergerac didn’t end the way everyone expects it to?

That’s the essential question that beats underneath Virginia Gay’s new take on the Rostand classic, last seen in a major production in Scotland when James McAvoy fronted Jamie Lloyd and Martin Crimp’s West End version for a spell in Glasgow.

Gay’s version is mightily different from what Lloyd and Crimp cooked up a few years back. With a wad of direct address and a fun-loving, casually-dressed company ready to deliver some cracking one-liners, everything about the show screams iconoclasm. Gay revels in the fact that her central character, Cyrano, is essentially a verbose arse at times (“The job of a poet is to make something more obvious and less obvious at the same time”) – concocting a fallible and snobby central figure who does a pretty naff job in woo-ing the object of affection – Roxane.

The other key difference is that Roxane isn’t particularly happy in being treated like an object. Gay picks apart Rostand’s famous balcony scene and shows how demeaning it is for the heroine, left deceived by the verbal offerings of two deceptive men.

At the same time, Roxane’s other love interest, Christian (wanting to be called Yan), is as unable to muster words while fawned over for his body. He is having his own existential angst (“How much am I plot and how much am I punchline”), leading to a hilarious moment referencing Parks and Recreation. 

Told with buckets of goodwill by the six-strong company, the show is a mighty hoot – a joyful dose of communal storytelling that feels unafraid not only to scribble in the margins, but tear out whole damn pages and rewrite the script. The show is set for a London transfer – for any southerners unable to reach Edinburgh – so don’t miss.