Review: Cyrano – Noël Coward Theatre

Adrian Lester holds a 4th-Dan black belt in Taekwondo. This detail, which might seem like idle biographical colour in a programme note, matters rather a lot once you see him fling himself across the Noël Coward stage in London’s West End during the early duelling sequences: cartwheeling, lunging and dispatching opponents with the casual authority of a man who has genuinely trained to hurt people.

He is 57.

Most actors his age are on their third Lear. Lester, making his RSC debut in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano, is playing a role that requires him to be simultaneously the best swordsman, the best poet, and the most comprehensively self-deceived man in 17th-century Paris, and he brings it off with a completeness that is simply not common in a long career of theatregoing.

So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

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Simon Evans’s Production and the McAvoy Contrast

Simon Evans’s production, transferring from the Swan in Stratford after a sold-out run last autumn, has the good sense to know what it has in Lester and to get out of his way. The opening scenes make brilliant use of Evans’s experience with corporate immersive events by establishing the meta-theatrical frame briskly: we are inside a theatre, actors materialise in the boxes and circle and stalls, the West End audience finds itself enrolled in the fiction before it has quite agreed to join. Cyrano, when he arrives, is accompanied by a six-piece band he has won in a bet about grammar; they follow him throughout the evening, playing when he wants them to and occasionally when he very much does not. It is a running joke that earns its keep.

What Evans and his co-adaptor Debris Stevenson have produced in their version of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 romantic drama is not a radical reinvention. This is a deliberate choice, and a noteworthy one. Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 production with James McAvoy — all rap battles, bare stage, Martin Crimp’s gonzo translation — set a standard of formal disruption against which any subsequent British Cyrano would be compared. Evans and Stevenson have taken a look at that and run in the opposite direction: the period setting of 1640s wartime France stays, the nose stays, the verse stays. The critical question is whether honouring the old is, in 2026, the more radical or the more conservative decision. The answer, on the evidence of this production, is that it depends entirely on who is doing the honouring.

Brummie Comedy and a Reimagined Roxane

Lester’s verse is spoken with an intoxicating, almost physical cadence. You understand, watching him, precisely why Roxane falls for the letters rather than their supposed author. The scene where he impersonates Christian from the shadows below Roxane’s window, adopting a cod Brummie accent to impersonate the hapless young soldier (played with genuinely winning dimness by Levi Brown) is the funniest sustained sequence of the night, funnier still for those who know that both Lester and Brown are from Birmingham.

Susannah Fielding’s Roxane is, refreshingly, not a romantic object in a plot that has traditionally treated her as little else. She plays a woman who is sharp, sceptical, and actively constructing her own romantic fantasy rather than passively receiving someone else’s; when she confronts Cyrano in the final act with anger over his silence, it lands as the response of someone who knows she has been made complicit in her own deception.

Transferring from The Swan to the Noël Coward Theatre

Grace Smart’s design is handsome: red curtains and varnished floorboards giving way to battlefield drabness, and a closing image of a lone, dying tree shedding its leaves across the stage that earns its symbolism because it arrives late and quietly, without announcement. Alex Baranowski’s music for the onstage band threads through the production like a second conversation, tracking the emotional weather underneath the rhetoric.

The production is not entirely faultless. Death is embodied here as a small boy recognisable as young Cyrano, hovering at the margins during key scenes. The symbolism of the child is (unlike that of the tree) blunt and obvious, and it arrives and departs without quite integrating into the production’s emotional logic. The Swan Theatre, which seats around 450 on a thrust stage, is not the Noël Coward, which seats 900 in a Victorian proscenium. Transfers of this kind do not always survive the move. This one largely does, compensating through Evans’s skills in creating an immersive environment: what this version loses in terms of dramatic intimacy, it reaps in terms of expanded visual scale with actors deployed to the upper tiers for some scenes.

The Devastating Climax of the Final Act

None of which quite prepares you for what the final twenty minutes do. Watching Lester’s Cyrano — proud, broken, still using wit as a weapon even as the words begin to desert him — finally acknowledge, too late and at last, that he has refused his own life, the room goes very quiet. Not the manufactured hush of a manipulative play or an overly sentimental musical. The silence of people genuinely stopped in their tracks. Such is the embarrassingly average state of West End theatre that critics have to pinch themselves at moments like this. Here, that moment happens because a 57-year-old man from a council estate in Birmingham with advanced martial skills has spent his entire career acquiring the craft to make it possible, and because an adaptation written with enough wit and restraint to trust the story it is telling has given him the room to do it.

Seven years ago, James McAvoy delivered his love letters to a beatboxer and an empty stage. That was also a very good Cyrano. But it is a less common thing to take a beloved text, treat it with care and intelligence and a prosthetic nose, and produce something that makes you genuinely grieve for what the man in the middle was never able to say.

Featured Image: Adrian Lester (Cyrano) in Cyrano de Bergerac (Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Noël Coward Theatre. Photo: © Marc Brenner.

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Cyrano de Bergerac will play the Noël Coward Theatre, London, from Saturday 13th June until Saturday 5th September 2026. For tickets or more information, click here: https://www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/cyrano-de-bergerac