A lengthy serving in the cause of love and war

Photo: Nobby Clark

Cyrano (Christian Edwards) prepares to exercise his sword-fighting skills.

CYRANO

Lowry Quays, Salford
As adapter Deborah McAndrew suggests in her note on this Northern Broadsides/Newcastle-u-Lyme New Vic co-production, Cyrano de Bergerac is one of those stories we all think we know - even if it's by way of Morecambe and Wise in the late Seventies or Steve Martin in the late Eighties.

To find out what she didn't know, the award-winning stage writer returned to the Rostand original - and found a mass of material with which to bring the relatively simple story of one girl, one stupid but good looking man and one intelligent and sensitive man with a very long nose to life.

If she had left it there, Cyrano might now be enjoying life as a stagey rom-com - indeed Conrad Nelson's production seems to veer in that direction in act one wherever possible.

But McAndrew has put in too much of the wider story - the friends, the rivals, the drunkard, the local baker, and even add a couple of songs - in a play that now runs to two hours and 50 minutes and is at least 30 minutes too long especially, as here, with an 8pm start.

And it's not just about length but also about tone: we know Cyrano is a fine and sensitive man, but throughout much of act one he's a bit of a bully, parading his fighting skills and basically forging his self-determined way through life thanks to a belief that his looks will always deny him Roxanne, the woman of his dreams and letters. At times the first act actually becomes a little tedious, so long-winded is it in telling a not-terribly-complicated story.

Admittedly the exposition of the first act sets up more business in the second as the war takes Christian and Cyrano away from the beloved Roxanne.

The love story element stalls again in favour of wartime privations - and then again, post-war, with a 14-year leap that doesn't exactly give us a satisfactory conclusion, merely a typically dreary French one.

Conrad Nelson's production simply moves too slowly and is too full of Cyrano's famed gift for poetry for its own good, though the work of the large cast, headed by Christian Edwards as Cyrano, Adam Barlow as Christian and Sharon Singh as Roxanne, is prodigious and certainly worthy of pacier material.