v239 p529(3)
Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1984
Terry Hands directed both plays, and has done it with daring ambidexterity.
The shimmering golden trees of Cyrano de Bergerac match the silvery trees on translucent panels is Much Ado About Nothing. The border of pitch black that
occasionally surrounds one set likewise surrounds the other. The music is quasi-Renaissance in Much Ado and quasi-Barogue in Cyrano, yet always faithful
to its own sweet modern character, and the soulful solo cello that opens Act I of Much Ado opens Act III of Cyrano. What the right hand does, so does the
left, and you come to feel that Much Ado's Italy and Cyrano's France are really the same gloriously handsome place.
The plays themselves, under Hands's direction, suddenly look alike. Much Ado suffers from a surfeit of Nothing in places where Something should be. Still,
you have the sense, as always in Shakespeare, that poetry has flooded its banks and is threatening to drown all and sundry in a sea of gorgeous
articulations, which is not only Cyrano's method, too, but practically its
theme. Poetry conquers all is the double lesson, made explicit in Cyrano by
the hero's magnificent ability to make meter and rhyme (in Anthony Burgess's bright, clever translation) go hand in glove with love, honor and a handy way
with a sword. Certainly love is everywhere the same in this Italo-France of gold and silvery trees. It thrives on indirection, surprise, feints, ambushes
and intermediaries. Much Ado's Beatrice and Benedick fall for each other only after the entire court puts in a helping hand. The helping hand with Cyrano
and Roxane is Christian's handsome face, and with Christian and Roxane it is Cyrano's ardent eloquence. Pandarus is everywhere at hand.
The lovers themselves, above all, are everywhere the
same. Here are Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack on one hand, and on the other, Cusack and Jacobi, until you feel, having seen one play and then the other,
that lovers must always be Cusack and Jacobi. Cusack does better as
Beatrice, which is natural, since Beatrice is an old hand at sharp-tongued sauciness
and is full of amorous depths, whereas Roxane must exude a fetching stupidity for three hours and more. As for Jacobi, I read in a newspaper interview
that he finds Benedick easier to play because the part is more congenial to his personality. With Cyrano he feels he has to stretch. I wonder if this
isn't why his Cyrano is hands down better, indeed is absolutely wonderful You do feel that Jacobi's Cyrano is stretching. He doesn't look like a
superhero; he only acts like one. His multiple superiorities--at wit, rhyme, insolence and hand-to-hand combat--seem like the product of effort,
which is exactly how they should seem: little-boy cockiness adopted to conceal a little-boy sense of inferiority caused by his famous handicap, that
damned hatrack, peninsula, writing desk, pair of unfurnished flats, perfumer's sign
and gothic porch of a nose.
Perhaps it's wrong to speculate on the actor's personality and its relation to
the part, especially with English actors, who are supposed to create their
roles by building up externals. Of what, then, do these externals consist?
Watching Jacobi in Cyrano, I felt that vowels are his handiest skill. However
many vowel sounds most of us command, Jacobi has a good hand on three times more and can expressively wind his syllables through a long catalogue of vowel
variations. Watching his handiwork in Much Ado I concluded that, on the contrary, nasality and vocal intensity are his secret strengths. Inconspicuous
wheezes, pleading sounds, semipleading sounds, nostrilizations, tonsillations, throat sounds, chest sounds and tongue variations of several sorts are at his
command, so that however many vowels he can sound in a single syllable, the possibilities multiply alarmingly by means of these additional techniques. The
result is a vast repertory, a mountain of expressive possibility. Thus his excellence as an actor. Then I went back to see him in Cyrano a second time,
and threw up my hands at deciding what in particular makes Jacobi so good, except that there he was, taking his bows at the end, and that enormous
audience was up on its feet, handclapping. Allow me to resume my seat. Cyrano does run a
little slow in the beginning, partly because of the uninspired set for the first act,
which refuses to frame an opening image for what the story is going to be. In Much Ado, it's after the intermission that the tempo gets out of hand. The
scene of outrage after Claudio denounces his betrothed in the less-than-successful romantic subplot are played with anger and indignation, as if the ado
were about something, which isn't the case. Every one of the lesser roles is performed splendidly in Cyrano, but not so in Much Ado, though Christopher
Benjamin does make a supreme ass of a Dogberry. And yet, as I've already remarked, Hurray--Hurray for that flood of poetry, those radiant sets (especially
in the otherwise less accomplished Much Ado), that display of inexplicable Jacobi-an technique, that romantic tension between Jacobi and Cusack which would
bring me back to see them in anything they perform. Hurray for the ticket policy, which reserves a handful of seats at $10 for anyone willing to get up
early and wait in line. And a nice hand for how the Royal Shakespeare Company
has fared in Terry Hands's capable ... Fingers.