And it all happens around a mic on a stage that’s mostly blank and white like an unwritten page.ĭirector Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour (also a hot ticket), have had the sense to get out of the way and strip everything back, to let the words and actors shine. Duels – like the one where Cyrano massacres a crap actor for massacring ‘Hamlet’ – are fought as rap battles or slam contests. The rapiers, intrigue and censorship of Cardinal Richelieu’s Paris, circa 1640, are modernised as razor-sharp banter about love, sex, and – nudge, wink – cultural appropriation. Writers are fighters and the word is everything in this firecracker show about passion, rejection, and the crazy genius of the spoken word. And writer Martin Crimp and director Jamie Lloyd have pulled off something improbably brilliant to get him here: taking Edmund Rostand’s frilly old French verse drama about a mournful musketeer with a massive nose and reinventing it as, basically, ‘Hamilton’ for Europeans. McAvoy is Cyrano: winner in words, loser in love – and he’s shit hot. For nearly three hours he spits fire, spraying lyrical pearls at his enemies, nailing rap battles and chucking his battered heart beneath the feet of the woman he loves, Roxane. That man is James McAvoy: booted and buzzcut like a Glaswegian squaddie and stripped to the waist. London’s hottest ticket is a middle-aged white man rapping.
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