Letter from London

Cyrano de Bergerac, adapted by Martin Crimp, directed by Jamie Lloyd, with James McAvoy, Playhouse Theatre

My Brilliant Friend, adapted by April De Angelis, directed by Mellie Still, National Theatre 

In two London theatres (one commercial, the other state-subsidised) last month I saw a new translation-adaptation of a classic 19^thcentury French verse drama about a 17^thcentury poet by a contemporary British playwright; and an epic two-part adaptation of a contemporary Italian novel-quartet (which has also been translated into English). Each reveals some of the characteristic advantages and pitfalls of adaption as a theatrical form – one that for various reasons (both artistic and commercial) is currently sweeping main stages around the world. Despite their historical and cultural differences, both productions also surprisingly complement each other as excavations of masculinity and femininity respectively, regardless of era or nationality.

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Everyone can identify with the brilliant but disfigured main character in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, because the play makes a commonplace experience (to love and to suffer in hopeless silence) feel special. I first read it as a self-absorbed and romantically challenged teenager; many initially encounter it on film, perhaps in Jean-Pierre Rappeneau’s lavish French swashbuckler with Gerard Depardieu, or Fred Schepisi’s 1980s Hollywood rom-com Roxanne with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. I’ve also seen it on stage at least three times, including an ambitious student production (whose Roxane I duly fell in love with) and an elegiac staging by Terry Hands (autumn leaves floated down throughout Act Five) with Derek Jacobi for the RSC in 1983, in an elegant translation by Anthony Burgess. 

Frankly however it’s a play I ultimately prefer reading or daydreaming about rather than actually watching. Perhaps this is due (as with Peer Gynt) to its inherently preposterous and even arguably unstageable plot, which includes duels in crowded theatres, large-scale battles and a nocturnal garden-balcony love-scene derived from Shakespeare and Mozart, but lacking either precursor’s sublime lyrical or musical artifice. Then there’s the challenge of representing Cyrano himself in the flesh: not only his famous nose, which has to be both large and convincing enough to render his predicament plausible, but also his unparalleled prowess as a swordsman and spontaneous wordsmith. In this regard the play suffers from the inevitable weakness that typically afflicts most dramatic representations of genius, especially when the latter has to be demonstrated onstage. In short, as the lead character in Educating Rita bluntly observes in reference to Peer Gynt, the best solution is probably to do it on the radio.

In fact Jamie Lloyd’s minimalist production of Martin Crimp’s ‘free adaptation’ of Cyrano (which is currently playing on the West End at the Playhouse Theatre) does something more or less along those lines. In doing so however – and despite some outstanding performances – for me it ultimately falls short in realising the potential of Crimp’s brilliant translation.

As with his earlier version of Molière’s The Misanthrope, the playwright renders Rostand’s neo-classical Alexandrines as a form of irregular rhymed verse that resembles spoken-word street poetry or rap. Lloyd’s production underlines this by having the actors use detachable microphones mounted on stands to deliver almost all their lines (with occasional live beat-box accompaniment from a fellow cast-member). This gave me the slightly jaded feeling that I was watching the fashionable West End equivalent of the latest production by the Berlin Schaubühne – an impression reinforced by set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour, who places the action (such as there is) on a bare stage inside what looks like a plywood box furnished only with a few chairs, and dresses the mostly young, culturally diverse and talented cast in modern-day street clothes. 

Critically (if not fatally), there’s a notable absence of swords or contemporary forms of weaponry. The duel in Act One is literally fought with words alone – although the ‘palpable hit’ with which Cyrano skewers his rival Valvert at the end their improvised face-off is implicitly visceral as well as verbal. Nor are there any visible cakes (or any other forms of merchandise) in ‘Madame’ Ragueneau’s barren café-bar-bookshop-patisserie where Cyrano has his rendezvous with Roxane in Act Two while its owner (played by a droll Michele Austin) runs her cookery and creative-writing class. As for the love-scene in Act Three where a concealed Cyrano feeds Christian his lines to Roxane and then impersonates him in the darkness, this takes place on a fully illuminated stage with neither garden or balcony in sight. The Siege of Arras in Act Four is likewise rendered abstractly through dialogue alone; even Christian’s death is represented by having him simply sit on the edge of the stage, where he remains like a ghost throughout the final Act.

To be sure, Rostand was a poet (like Cyrano himself) as well as a dramatist; and the play certainly celebrates language more than fighting or arguably even love. Nevertheless I found Lloyd’s overall strategy of favouring verbal over physical action curiously cerebral and even bloodless – rather like watching a moved reading or semi-staged recitation rather than a fully fledged production. Interestingly Crimp’s adaptation (a copy of which I bought at the theatre) doesn’t indicate the same level of ‘conceptual’ staging; and there’s no mention of microphones or beat-boxing. Indeed the stage directions in the text specify that Cyrano ‘wounds’ Valvert (‘who staggers back, bleeding’); and the visceral impact of the battle in Act Four is emphasized by stage directions that refer to ‘gunshots’, ‘mortar fire’ and ‘explosions’ (none of which were audible in the production). In fact Crimp’s text is arguably at its most distinctive in this use of historical mash-up, in which jokes about 21^stcentury identity politics jostle with arcane references to the eclipse of poetry by prose in the later 17^thcentury, the niceties of swordplay give way to the horrors of industrialized warfare, and the Siege of Arras in the Thirty Years War (which provides the original context for the play) implicitly becomes the Battle of Arras in the First World War nearly four centuries later. I found myself wanting to see this composite, messy world concretely realised onstage, even in a theatrically stylised or artificial form – fake blood, swords, guns, explosions, noses and all. In short: for me Lloyd’s production lacked the corporeal (as well as linguistic) outrageousness that is essential to the theatricality of Rostand’s play – and is at least latent in Crimp’s adaptation. 

As for the lead performances: Scottish actor James McAvoy (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland, X-Men) gives Cyrano an undeniable injection of star power, as well as possessing the requisite stage charisma and bravura acting chops, especially in his crisp delivery of Crimp’s sparkling text. In this he’s well-matched by Anita-Joy Uwaje’s dazzling Roxane (as intellectually scathing as she is beautiful, making the depth of Cyrano’s devotion to her all the more plausible). The play’s central love triangle is completed by Eben Figueiredo’s gentle, sensitive Christian (who is likewise no fool, but simply out of his depth as a recent arrival in Paris, and tongue-tied when it comes to the language of love). 

In keeping with the production’s aesthetic, however, there’s no big nose (fake or real) to be seen. Perhaps the point is simply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (including the ‘I’ of one’s own self-consciousness); but the lack of a visual ‘objective correlative' reduces the pathos of Cyrano’s situation, as well as the dramatic stakes whenever his enlarged appendage is mentioned – not to mention its unavoidably comic and even potentially phallic associations. Without it, McAvoy’s Cyrano is just as good-looking as Figueiredo’s Christian – and emphatically more macho. In this regard, one of production’s funniest (and most revealing) moments occurs in Act Two, when Cyrano’s army comrades tumble onstage into Ragueneau’s shop, chant their admiration for their leader (‘Who’s the man we always back?’ / ‘Cyrano de Bergerac!’) and proceed to strip and cavort around him like football team-mates in a change-room – a display of hyper-masculinity which Cyrano’s effete arch-enemy De Guiche (a caustic Tom Edden) describes with comic distaste as too much ‘vigorous male nudity before breakfast’. It’s almost as if the properly phallic quality of being excessive or de tropthat usually attaches to Cyrano’s nose is here displaced onto what it means – symbolically and literally – to ‘be a man’. The result however is to make his sexual introversion with Roxane seem less due to any actual physical ugliness than to some kind of neurosis or even phobia about sex or women – an impression reinforced in Act Five by Roxane’s understandable rage on discovering how she has been manipulated by both men when Cyrano reveals the truth about his authorship of Christian’s letters and secret lifelong love for her. 

Indeed Crimp departs from Rostand’s text most substantially in this final Act by making Roxane an alcoholic who haunts Ragueneau’s café-bar and has become De Guiche’s sexual property after losing both the love of her life and her former independence of spirit (rather than having withdrawn to a convent as in the original). Even more controversially, Crimp changes Cyrano’s famous last words: instead of invoking his own ‘panache’ (the French term refers equally to his flamboyant style and to the tuft of feathers on his cap), he dies in mid-sentence – ‘Have you not heard? / The hero always has to have the final…have the final…have the…’ (Lights dim) – echoing the dying words of that other great archetypal stage neurotic, Hamlet: ‘The rest is silence’.

As this meta-textual ending suggests, Crimp is a highly ironic and formally self- conscious playwright. As such he is decidedly out of step with the literalism, naturalism and political correctness that afflicts so much British and English-language theatre, at least on the main stages (including in the US and Australia). In this regard, as with the character of Alceste in Crimp’s earlier adaptation of The Misanthrope, his Cyrano could almost be construed as a self-portrait – and certainly an obstinate contrarian, defiantly at odds with his era, both as a writer and a man. Indeed McAvoy is at his most anguished when Cyrano is railing against the political, social, cultural and commercial forces that would limit his freedom as an artist, perversely insisting that he ‘needs’ the fuel of ‘their hate’ in order to ‘create’. Significantly however this outburst occurs in Act Two just after Roxane has unwittingly rejected him by innocently revealing that she loves Christian instead of him. Consequently there’s a sense that his need for rejection is as much psychological as it is artistic. Perhaps – again like Alceste in The Misanthrope – there’s even a touch of misogyny as well as misanthropy here. 

In fact Crimp’s ‘free adaptations’ are arguably at their most revealing as double-edged critiques of political/artistic correctness and contemporary masculinity. This might explain the otherwise anomalous moment in Act Four (most certainly not to be found in Rostand) when Christian suddenly asks Cyrano seemingly out-of-the-blue: ‘Is there a version / Of life where two men can live as one person?’ – and then unexpectedly kisses him, before hastily backing away and exiting to die in battle. Reflecting on this moment afterwards, it didn’t strike me so much as one of revelation about either man’s sexuality, as one of fleeting realisation about the constraints and distortions of gender-identity. It’s almost as if they were both half-men, like the mythical split-beings of desire evoked by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, each seeking a missing part of themselves in the form of an idealised love which they share for the same woman. Perhaps this condition of ‘half-manhood’ is one of the most valuable insights Crimp’s version of Cyrano has to offer us as his (I mean both Crimp’s and in a sense Cyrano’s) contemporaries. 

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If Crimp’s Cyrano can be read as a playful deconstruction of masculinity in its baroque, romantic and contemporary guises, then April De Angelis’s epic two-part five-hour adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (directed by Mellie Still and currently playing on the vast open stage of the Olivier Theatre at the National) is a comprehensive and penetrating exposé of the traps and contradictions that beset women, femininity and feminism in post-war Naples that speaks directly and urgently to contemporary women and men everywhere today. 

Di Angelis is a British playwright of part-Sicilian heritage who began her career as an actor; several of her plays are based on historical research and feature female protagonists. My Brilliant Friend was originally commissioned by the Rose Theatre in Kingston-Upon-Thames in 2016, and premiered there the following year with a cast of ten actors (expanded at the National to twenty-four) playing a total of forty characters from ten different families who mostly live in a working-class suburb of Naples (later scenes take place elsewhere in Italy as the story unfolds). The multiracial British cast use their own accents, and play multiple roles with the aid of simple costume changes, wigs, animated or exaggerated physicality and the especially effective use of puppetry (designed and directed by Toby Olié, who also worked on the National’s production of War Horse) to represent the two main characters’ childhood dolls – and later their actual children – as well as in key moments of physical violence. Set and costumes are designed by Soutra Gilmour (who also designed Cyrano) and feature multileveled mobile towers of scaffolding and wood equipped with stairways and platforms that the cast wheel around, reconfigure, race up and down or perch on to observe or act out scenes. The dynamic staging and sense of ensemble are appropriate to the epic story of a lifelong relationship between two women that is also the portrait of a community (arguably the third main character is the unnamed neighbourhood of Naples in which most of the action takes place) – and beyond that of an entire society convulsed by change in the post-war era of reconstruction that extends from the late 1940s to the present.  

Pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’ (My Brilliant Friend is the title of the first instalment, followed by The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child) have attracted a global following since they were first published in Italy between 2011 and 2014 (and subsequently translated into English by Ana Goldstein within a year of each novel’s Italian release, as well as into many other languages since). The powerful grip they exert on their readers (myself included) is primarily due to their visceral evocation of female experience under the combined onslaught of capitalism and patriarchy, and in particular the intensity with which they convey what De Angelis has referred to (in an interview with The New Yorker) as ‘women’s anger made real’. 

Undoubtedly their fascination is also attributable to their author’s scrupulous effacement of her real-life identity. Ferrante insists in written (and carefully guarded) interviews that this is a deliberate artistic and critical strategy (and perhaps even an existential choice) designed to place herself (and her role as an author) outside the circuit of publicity and to let her works ‘speak for themselves’. Intentionally or not, however, it also promotes an aura of mystery, as well as the paradoxical illusion of autobiography (an impression which is explicitly and painstakingly dispelled by Ferrante herself). This ‘reality-effect’ is heightened by the fact that the novels assume the form of a first-person memoir, whose narrator shares the author’s (pseudonymous) first name Elena (though she is mostly called ‘Lenù’ by the other characters) – and who herself becomes a successful writer, in the course of what is effectively a Bildungsroman or roman-fleuve (as Ferrante acknowledges, the novels were conceived and written as a single work).

Unlike its generic precursors however (from Goethe’s archetypal ‘novel of development’ Wilhelm Meister to later novel-sequences by Romain Rolland or Proust), the ‘Neapolitan Quartet’ is not primarily a story of (typically male) artistic formation, but rather one of tormented friendship between two women. Lenù and her counterpart Lila grow up together in a poverty-stricken outer suburb of Naples, but their educational, marital and professional paths increasingly diverge, while the emotional bond between them becomes correspondingly more and more fraught. In part this is due to their respective parents: Lila’s traditionally sexist working-class father won’t allow his preternaturally gifted daughter to continue her education beyond primary school (and even throws her out of a window when she secretly takes the middle-school entrance exam); whereas the similarly driven but less self-confident Lenù goes on to high school and university despite the opposition of her embittered and jealous mother. However their divergence also reflects a difference in temperament and perhaps even a kind of primordial splitting or division of personality-traits between them, which results in a (conscious or unconscious) assignment of roles in each other’s lives, in the world, and in the unfolding drama that awaits them. As such they are more like counterparts or soul-sisters than friends, with all the frustrations of love, hate, rivalry and obsession that such a complementarity entails. In essence, Lila is the rebel, and Lenù the conformist – although neither role fits comfortably, and both women suffer equally though in different ways from the strictures of a society that is deeply divided by class, gender and sexuality (the one explicitly gay character in the story – who also transgresses social norms in terms of their gender-identity – is eventually murdered by their gangster-lover). Underlying all the conflicts that drive the story is a bedrock of violence – its permanent threat, its regular enforcement, its irregular outbursts – in a culture that has been variously traumatized by Fascism, organised crime, religion, corruption, impoverishment, and deeply rooted misogyny and homophobia. 

The challenge to dramatizing the novels is that they are entirely written from Lenù’s point of view, and events are largely refracted through her consciousness. Ferrante’s deceptively lucid but at times febrile prose primarily communicates the heaving crosscurrents of her protagonist’s thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations, most of which (as befits her character, in contrast with Lila, and apart from certain key turns in the plot) remain internalized and even unexpressed. Theatre on the other hand demands externalisation in the form of action and dialogue. In fact there’s very little of the latter in the novels, and a preponderance of exposition, description and reflection, none of which inherently lend themselves to the stage. In other words, a radical act of adaptation is required; and neither play nor production is entirely successful in achieving this.

The show works best when embracing its inherently rough-and-ready aesthetic as a form of physical and image-based storytelling derived from Brechtian epic theatre and more recent British and European companies like Shared Experience, Theatre de Complicité, Theatre de Soleil or Peter Brook’s productions at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord. The most effective moments involve a heightened theatricality and materiality, such as the use of puppetry or stylized physicality (imaginatively choreographed by movement director Sarah Dowling) – notably to represent Lila’s borderline psychotic episodes of distorted perception or ‘dissolving boundaries’. My favourite moment in the whole show was the orgy of dismemberment (involving fake limbs and eyes being ripped from their sockets) that is wreaked in fantasy by the two protagonists on their male betrayers and tormentors during Lila’s wedding at the end of Part One, which went way beyond the literal staging of the novel that dogged so much of the dramaturgy elsewhere, while effectively communicating the Bacchic frenzy of Ferrante’s prose at its most delirious.

Special mention must also be made of the two riveting central performances: Niamh Cusack as the more cautious, controlled and conciliatory (but nonetheless deeply divided) Lenù; and Catherine McCormack as the more direct, defiant, and wilfully destructive (but perhaps ultimately more vulnerable) Lila. Watching them seal their Faustian pact of loyalty at the start of the show by swapping dolls was a thrilling epiphany (for this reader of the novels at least); indeed I found myself wanting the entire adaptation to be structured around them as a minimalist two-hander, with the two protagonists playing all the other roles, regardless of age or gender. As it was, I found most of the rest of the unnecessarily large cast to be grievously underused, and in most cases under-par in terms of their performances, frequently reducing their characters to two-dimensional stereotypes (in part this was due to the writing and direction, both of which tended to reduce the story to a whistle-stop tour of the main plot-points; while much of the dialogue was clumsily expositional and devoid of dramatic thrust or genuine characterisation). Two signal exceptions to this were an amusing and touching performance from Justin Avoth as Pietro, Lenù’s well-meaning but irremediably clumsy, unwittingly oppressive and ultimately pathetic academic husband, and a mesmerizing turn from Colin Ryan as Alfonso Carracci, Lila’s geeky schoolboy admirer who later becomes her cross-dressing alter-ego, before finally falling victim to the perverse attentions of her nemesis, the sadistic Michele Solara (an insufficiently menacing Adam Burton).

In sum: like watching the theatrical equivalent of an HBO miniseries, My Brilliant Friend offers a compelling visual and dramatic world, at least two great performances and enough thrilling moments to deliver a cumulatively satisfying and compulsive five hours in the theatre, either seen (as in my case) over two days, or (as is possible on weekends) at a single sitting. Whether it ultimately transcends its status as a staging of the books to become an autonomous work of theatre than will inspire future productions remains to be seen.

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My Brilliant Friend is currently running at The National Theatre until February 22.

Cyrano De Bergerac is at the Playhouse Theatre until February 29.