stage
A production of Cyrano at the Blackfriars adds some twists to the question of appropriate theatrical technique. The play is set in the French 17th century, when staging practices were similar to those which the American Shakespeare Center seeks to reproduce. Indeed, the first act of Cyrano unfolds in a small theater much like the original London Blackfriars of Shakespeare’s day. But this is a play within a play, a stage upon a much more elaborate stage—Rostand’s drama dates from 1897, and its detailed directions assume the fullest technical resources of fin-de-siècle Parisian theater: special lighting, numerous props, a deep proscenium stage with sets and backdrops allowing realistic depiction of a cookshop, a battlefield, a convent garden. Can Cyrano survive the minimalist Blackfriars treatment?
 What’s the easiest way to true love? Follow your nose! Tyler Moss as titular character Cyrano de Bergerac and Anna Marie Sell as Roxane at Blackfriars Playhouse. |
In fact, one hardly misses the material contrivances of Rostand’s era. As in Blackfriars productions of Shakespeare, the players are in a garden when they say they are; Cyrano and Roxane are invisible to each other on a stage darkened only by their words; the imagination demanded of the audience by the Chorus in Henry V works as readily at the siege of Arras as on the field of Agincourt. Only in the difficult ensemble scene that opens Act I, with its mélange of line-fragments thrown from all corners of the stage, would scenery have been very helpful in establishing the setting.
That scene and others might also have benefited from a subtler, more generously paced approach. ASC’s broad interpretations seem better suited to Shakespeare than to this belle-époque pastiche of the equally refined reign of Louis XIV. Though Tyler Moss sustains the title role with energy and verve, he just misses the aristocratic grace that should mark Cyrano as a Gallic nobleman, if a rustic and impoverished one. He and fellow cast members are sometimes too loud, too strained, too hurried in delivering lines that were conceived in the original as stately alexandrine verse (perhaps inadequately rendered by the colloquial and rather British translation by Anthony Burgess). An instructive contrast is the less frenetic acting of Anna Marie Sell as Roxane and of Joseph Langham as De Guiche, the elegant semi-villain who is Cyrano’s necessary foil. Langham in particular shows how restraint and weight of presence can nearly steal the show from noisier, busier actors.