By
Bernard Weiner, Chronicle Theater Critic
San Francisco Chronicle
1984
LOS ANGELES—Last week, at the Olympic Arts Festival here, Derek Jacobi
soared to Shakespearean heights with his brilliant interpretation of Benedick in
the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” On Tuesday, Jacobi did it again, this time enrapturing an
opening-night audience with his superbly nuanced acting in “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
With his plain, pudgy face—a kind of neutral dough that can be twisted
and kneaded into any desired emotion—and with the aid of a slight beard and
the protruding proboscis of Cyrano, Jacobi is virtually unrecognizable as the
vibrant hero of Edmond Rostand’s romantic classic.
Jacobi’s Cyrano is the epitome of the dashing, self-assured swordsman,
poet, wit and supreme individualist—except that his “gross protuberance,”
as he calls it, ensures his loneliness and isolation, partially because of
society’s treatment of those deemed “deformed,” and partially out of his
own fear of rejection.
He wants to confess his love for his beauteous cousin Roxane, but when
she tells him that she’s fallen for the handsome Gascon cadet Christian and
wants Cyrano’s aid in helping the match succeed, the long-nosed one’s fate
is sealed. For the rest of the
play, Cyrano is condemned never to speak his heart directly to Roxane, except
through the assumed identity of the inarticulate Christian, for whom he composes
love letters.
There’s nary a dry eye in the house when Jacobi, pretending to be
Christian under Roxane’s window, finally reveals the infinite depths of
Cyrano’s love for her, and later, in the closing convent scene, when Cyrano,
about to die, has to deal with Roxane’s belated discovery that it was he and
not Christian that she had fallen in love with, lo those many years ago.
Jacobi offers us acting at its most pure and sublime level, well
deserving of the ovations and bouquets thrown onto the stage at show’s end.
Jacobi (American audiences probably are most familiar with his starring
role in the TV series, “I, Claudius”) is mesmerizing from his first line,
spoken unseen from the dark, to his last, as, mortally wounded, he is finally
“free of this filthy world,” in the arms of his love and his friends.
Jacobi can take mere moments and turn them into whole plays. Just one
example: Roxane recites passages
from “Christian’s” letters, and Jacobi’s face lights up as he hears his
own poetry spoken with such acceptance and love—yet at the same time, he must
make light of the verse so as not to give away his game.
This all happens in a split second on Jacobi’s mobile face and in his
expressive eyes, and yet there’s an entire novel of joy, pain, deceit, and
fear of rejection in that single moment.
Jacobi can take the play’s most famous comic scenes and make them seem
newly minted. In front of his
fellow Gascon guards, Cyrano points up the lack of wit of a fellow who chooses
to insult his nose by reeling off a litany of possible nasal epithets.
Later, Jacobi wonderfully unravels the “moon” monologue—in order to
divert the evil Comte de Guiche’s attention, Cyrano describes at great length
his techniques for lunar levitation—using a Scottish brogue so thick that the
word “dew” bifurcates into two syllables.
Sinead Cusack, so exceptional as Beatrice in “Much Ado,” is something
of a disappointment here as Roxane. Her performance is by no means bad—indeed,
she has some lovely, moving scenes with Cyrano.
It’s just that she can’t quite rise to Jacobi’s level.
Of course, the playwright didn’t give her
much help, creating
characters who almost always stand in Cyrano’s shadow.
Rostand’s beautifully sentimental and wonderfully crafted play is the
beneficiary of a consummate translation by Anthony Burgess, replete with lovely
rhymes and literate witticisms (“Christian,” calls Cyrano, “come get your
lines thrown at you”).
Director Terry Hands is a master at creating vibrant, believable crowd
scenes, and he starts off with an exceptional view of 18th-century
theatre life, aided enormously by Ralph Koltai’s impressive set, including
chandeliers gargantuan enough to match Cyrano’s sense of self as he perches on
one.
“Much Ado” and “Cyrano” which plays here through Saturday, will
open in New York shortly.