Perth Festival 2023: Cyrano

by Virginia Gay (after Edmond Rostand)

Melbourne Theatre Company

Presented by Black Swan and Perth Festival

Director Sarah Goodes

Musical Director Xani Kolac

Choreographer Janine Oxenham

Set designer Elizabeth Gadsby

Costume designer Jo Briscoe

Lighting designer Paul Jackson

Sound designer Kelly Ryall

Performed by Holly Austin, Zenya Carmellotti, Virginia Gay, Robin Goldsworthy, Joe Jackson and Tuuli Narkle

Heath Ledger Theatre

February 17 – March 5 2023

Here comes the happy ending! Virginia Gay (l) and the cast of Cyrano (pic: Daniel L Grant)

It’s easy to see why Australia’s big market theatre companies are programming radical re-imaginings of classic stories. Let’s be frank; it makes good box office sense for audiences for whom familiarity breeds content, while providing plenty of opportunity for the companies to display their technical chops, the talent at their disposal and their creative heft.

This year’s Perth festival delivers two prominent examples, the Sydney Theatre Company’s spectacular cine-theatre take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde horror show and, now, the Melbourne Theatre’s romp-com mash up of Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Both stories were sensations of the 19^th Century fin de siècle that have since become ingrained in high and pop cultural literacy; both have become part of our language.

And both are malleable properties in the hands of writers and directors with the inclination and skill to bend and shape them.

Virginia Gay’s Cyrano is the more entertaining of the two, despite the dazzling pyrotechnics of Kip Williams’ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

This may be in part a comfort zone issue. Cyrano lives fairly and squarely where it belongs, on a stage in a theatre. The claim that, from the ghost light centre-stage stage as it begins to the tinsel and glitter as it ends, it’s primarily in homage to live theatre, is one I’ll happily buy, while Jekyll and Hyde lives in a kind of ether where the theatre is a convenient space for something that could be just as easily performed on a movie lot or anywhere large and dark, and the homage is as much to the screen as the stage.

Enough: On with the show.

Gay’s other great love is language, and this makes her a perfect fit, both as writer and actor, for Cyrano, whose most potent weapon, apart from the sword we never see unsheathed, is wit and wordplay.  

She dominates her posse-cum-chorus (the superb, hysterical trio of Holly Austin, Zenya Carmelotti and uncanny David Templeman doppelganger Robin Goldsworthy) with words laced with a touch of eyeball-to-eyeball intimidation.

But when the perfect Roxanne, (Tuuli Narkle), roller-skates into her life in a pure white mist, her words fail her.

What transpires is a case of flesh and bone may break my heart, but words will never win me. The fleshy, bony item in question is Yan (Joel Jackson), a chiselled hunk of spunk from the Pilbara who bowl Roxanne over, leaving Cyrano bereft.

Sure Cyrano and Roxy still have a nice thing happening – one delightful scene has them cuddled up and tossing witticisms they’ve pilfered from famous lines from the classics at each other – but it’s all too, too, BFF, and when the services of the production’s Intimacy Co-ordinator (Amy Cater) are called for, it’s Roxanne and Yan she’s working with.

The second-most famous balcony scene and the second-most notorious nose in history are both played for laughs, and earn them all, as do all the neatly constructed comic set pieces that are liberally sprinkled throughout the show.

Every one of the actors are expert winkers and nodders, and there are plenty, but not too many, merry song parodies, from Jobim’s sublime Girl from Ipanema to the Archie’s ridiculous Sugar Sugar, courtesy of musical director Xani Kolac.

Plenty, but not too many, is the guiding principle of Gay’s writing and Sarah Goodes well-measured direction.

There are in-jokes and local references, but not too many.

Cyrano teeters on the edge of the trap wherein lurks the creature pantomime, but escapes the slippery slope.

The other trap it evades with style is proselytising; Cyrano, obviously enough, is a queer take on the celebrated old romance, but it sails on heedless of any need to make, let alone labour, the point.    

There are subtle moments too; Roxanne may be perfect, but she might also be just a tad insufferable. Love, you know, is blind.

And Cyrano, for all her bluster, learns how precious love is, even if you are only granted fragments of it. You can have just enough, so you don’t lose it all.

She doesn’t; Gay cheats the fate of Rostand’s de Bergerac, and when Cater is next called for, Cyrano is among those being co-ordinated.

A happy ending, and a more than happy audience.

After this sweet treat of a show, so they should be.