Review: Cyrano

Australian actor and director, Valentina Gay, brings a reworked and updated version of Cyrano de Bergerac to the Traverse Theatre, in a queered rewrite which brings to the forefront ideas of the construction of gender, language and the theatre, with a delightfully hilarious script and a talented band of actors. 

Gay plays the eponymous role of Cyrano (usually played by a man), a character known for their mastery of words and their, er, car crash of a nose. Cyrano falls for the beautiful and academic Roxane but Roxane in turn is bowled over by soldier Yan’s charming look. Yet Yan’s chat does nothing for Roxane, who is enchanted by Cyrano’s poetics even though she is not physically attracted. So Yan and Cyrano devise a plan to make use of Yan as a mouthpiece for Cyrano’s words. 

In some productions Cyrano is given a prosthetic nose but Gay choses not to. It allows the play to explore higher themes of identity, and the metaphorical big nose we all have; the things that people judge us on before we have opened our mouths. Racial discrimination is explored deftly in the script with Roxane, played by black actor Jessica Whitehurst, rallying against Cyrano’s lament that Roxane has no idea what it is like to be judged before you come into the room. 

Cyrano being played by Gay is also well thought out as it calls into questions about the male gaze and how women’s sexuality is sanctified to a fault. The scenes where Cyrano, Roxane and Yan converse about ideas of desire, sex and lust are perhaps the show’s strongest with Whitehurst being the standout performance. 

There are also three unnamed characters who form the chorus and are used to great effect, whether commentary or comedy. All the actors are so sharp and full of life, it seems they have had great direction from Gay. 

The show did suffer a bit in its ending and also when Gay’s writing deals more with romance than desire. In both instances it descends a little into cheese territory with the wordsmith Cyrano delivering something that sounds more like ChatGPT than the Shakespearean sonnets it references. Yet this really is a tiny part of the show and it is overall magic: in acting, in vision and in writing.