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Cyrano de Bergerac

 
Rebecca Vines Review by Rebecca Vines 5 Published: 20 Oct 2025 Royal Shakespeare Company Show Dates: 20 Oct 2025-15 Nov 2025

When Edmond Rostand wrote a fictionalised account of the life of the 17th-century author Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897, he could not have comprehended the literary legacy this hybrid character would continue to flaunt over a century later.

This will quietly creep up on you and change your life.

In this stunning new adaptation by Debris Stevenson and director Simon Evans, a delicately wrought world of laughter and tears is conjured with exquisite precision and emotional sensitivity. Not a moment is superfluous. Not a second is wasted.

We first meet the young Cyrano in dappled sunlight: a straw hat covering his face, and thus the generous facial appendage that haunts his existence. The nose is an invention of Rostand’s and has no historical evidence, but it provides a heartbreakingly real reason for his inability to declare himself fully to the woman he loves so passionately that he would rather another take his place than embarrass them both by revealing his feelings.

A man of tenderness and war; a poet and a soldier; a lover and a celibate; a beacon of sincerity yet living a lie... Cyrano is a role for the ages. Adrian Lester, in an inexplicably tardy RSC debut, is devastating as the hero who counts himself so poor and plainly made that no honest love could ever come to him.

Every moment he is on stage, Lester crackles with an electricity that cannot help but draw the audience into understanding the aching rationale for aiding young lover Christian to woo Roxanne. His self-sabotaging pretence somehow makes sense, and the brittle façade that hides the profundity of his loathing for what nature gave him is overwhelming in its intensity.

Whether in a battle of wits with the slimy Comte (the ever-excellent Scott Handy); mentoring the charming dufus who erroneously wins Roxanne’s heart (a winsome Levi Brown); or bantering with Ragueneau (Christian Patterson), Cyrano appeals to us all precisely because he speaks the truths we would all like to utter. He is grumpy, taciturn, ironic, verbose, provocative, and soothing, but never less than truthful—except, of course, in his personal life.

These scenes with Roxanne (Susannah Fielding) are realised with a poignant economy of skill: each minuscule facial reaction betraying a lifetime of emptiness and estrangement. The final minutes are played with extraordinary restraint, which somehow amplifies their pain and leaves a lingering impression as one of the most beautiful moments one could be privileged to see in contemporary theatre.

Fielding is exactly as described: all angles and energy. She breathes an intoxicating sense of life into what could be a cipher of a character and proves herself a more than worthy recipient of Cyrano’s compositions. Fielding imbues the character with such freshness and modernity that we long to see the world – fragmented and ugly though it is – through her eyes. This makes her tacit acceptance of loneliness and solitude all the harder to bear, and her final desolation feels all too much as though it is also ours.

The PR of every show will tell you that you need to see it. Event theatre will take your money, sell you a ‘name’, and leave you with all the cultural nutrition of a theatrical Happy Meal.

But real theatre will quietly creep up on you and change your life in the course of a few hours. And the spellbinding Cyrano de Bergerac is just that. Real. Authentic. True. Unforgettable.

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The Blurb:

Poet, soldier and philosopher. Cyrano de Bergerac burns with brilliance. He's fiercely funny and intensely romantic – but behind the veil of wit is one large problem: his nose. Haunted by doubts and too proud to beg, he watches from the shadows as Roxane – bold, beautiful and seemingly unreachable – falls for another man, Christian. But this handsome, tongue-tied young suitor knows his only hope of charming Roxane is to seduce her with words. And only one person can help…