Cyrano de Bergerac (Royal and Derngate, Northampton)

You can tell a lot about a Cyrano from the nose he picks. Nigel Barrett‘s is tuberous and rosy – like a bulb of garlic having a hot flush. It suits him rather well. It makes him a clown, but not a fool or a buffoon. Rather a goodly, kind innocent; one of life’s smiling saints.

His Cyrano is not the great wit, still less the pretentious show-off, and, yes, you miss those qualities and the humour they bring. He is, however, a gentle soul; a man who loves too much; a poet who breathes in the world through his oversized nostrils. It’s not just that he loves Roxane (Cath Whitefield) to the nth degree – he sticks to her like a bur to a trouser leg – but that he extends his love to everyone around him, especially Christian, his handsome, tongue-tied rival for her heart.

Cyrano starts as a parasite. Since Christian has the looks he lacks, Cyrano uses him a host of sorts, as his avatar. It’s the sort of symbiotic relationship the Pet Shop Boys sang about: I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks. (Let’s team up to get into a girl’s pants…) Cyrano puts up the wooing words that Chris Jared’s anxious Christian can’t spit out.

In striking the deal, Barrett pulls him in for a hug and flicks us a conspiratorial glance. The plan is to leapfrog his rival, ditching him once he’s through the door. Instead, he discovers a kind of satisfaction in the situation, expressing his love without enacting it, and, when Christian dies in battle, he keeps schtum to protect Roxane’s idea of him. At what point, though, does that silence – loving though it might be – become cowardice?

That initial competitive edge is presumably why Jean Chan’s design plonks us in an dusty school gym. Climbing frames stand in for look-out posts; a vault horse becomes Roxane’s balcony. This is a training ground for love, a place for teamwork perhaps, but also a world of vanity, where physical appearances rule and gym bunnies dominate.

The problem is that Lorne Campbell's staging – a Northern Stage-Northampton co-production – is a hotch-potch; neither set in the gym, nor in 17th Century France. The ensemble, all acting apprentices at Northern Stage, look like the England football team circa Stanley Matthews. Cyrano and co. are in capes and plumes. Cath Whitefield’s Roxanne wears black denim beneath her farthingales – a kind of protest against gooey, prettified romantic leads, she’s more like a boyish hero with her swashbuckling wit. It’s saying lots of things a bit, but nothing in particular – and, my goodness, it’s sluggish, almost to the point of being languid.

It’s Barrett himself that comes to the fore. He’s a here-and-now actor, incapable of not being himself on stage and it works well, making Cyrano an example worth aspiring to. He stands onstage and speaks the poetry in his soft Welsh burr and the rest of the play, the fiction, melts away. Trouble is, everyone else onstage is doing all they can to sustain it.

Cyrano de Bergerac runs at Royal and Derngate, Northampton until 25 April, then transfers to Northern Stage from the 29 April to 16 May