Allergic reaction
Rachel Halliburton
Cyrano de Bergerac Olivier Oleanna Garrick Democracy Wyndham's
The nose has a prominent literary history — whether it's as a barometer for lies in Pinocchio, a suggestively protruding organ in the works of Rabelais, or a powerful detective of human appetites in Patrick Stiskind's Perfume. And in an age of Botox-beauty and anti-wrinkle fascism, the giant-schnozzled Cyrano de Bergerac is perhaps a hero that the 21st century needs to celebrate, even if — when it comes to love — his is the honk that dare not speak its name.
So it is distressing to report that the new version of Cyrano at the National is marred by eye-watering anachronisms, and rhyme-schemes that provoke a desire to howl at the moon. The translation is by Irish writer Derek Mahon, who has been praised in the past as 'a Belfast Keats with a Popean sting'. Yet it seems that he has suffered an allergic reaction to Edmond Rostand's 19th-century classic, and the result (rhyming 'talcum powder' with 'natural odour', or quipping about 'a fast toe up the arse') is both linguistically bumpy and metaphorically irritating.
Over the past two decades, actors including Derek Jacobi, Tom Mannion, and Antony Sher have swaggered across the stage in the title role, and now it is Stephen Rea's turn to evoke the hero who wields words as dexterously as his sword. Despite the imperfect poetry, Rea grabs the heart with eyes that could make a depressed labrador look upbeat, and a Belfast voice that sings and caresses its way seductively through the turn-ti-turn cadences.
In his portrayal, it is possible to see the historical figure of Cyrano de Bergerac before Rostand gave him the Three Musketeer treatment — an anti-war rebel with a piercing intellect that satirised social pretensions and dreamed about scientific theories of the moon. Director Howard Davies has emphasised this more realistic down-to-earth Cyrano by commissioning designer William Dudley to create a vast scaffolding-set but oppressive lighting makes it seem more like a prison of the imagination than a climbing frame for the mind.
His heroine — Claire Price's Bottieelli beautiful Roxane — has a lightning appreciation of linguistic nuance that makes her the dramatic antithesis of Carol in Olecinna. When Harold Pinter's production of David Mamet's play opened at the Royal Court in 1993, it was greeted as a sizzling dispatch from the front lines of political correctness; so the major question in 2004 is whether the drama has maintained its white heat.
Lean, blond and chisel-jawed, Hollywood star Aaron Eckhart plays John, the university professor who finds himself battered by allegations of rape after he tries to reassure an insecure female student. Director Lindsay Posner has deliberately cast an actor who is more conventionally sexy than David Suchet — the pro fessor in Pinter's production so that interesting ambiguities might be perceived in his relationship with his student Carol, here played by rising film star Julia Stiles.
Stiles — an intelligent actress — grows from hunched neurotic to linguistically myopic Fury. Her character, even now, must wrestle for sympathy, as a far from bright female student hijacking her professor's words and giving them absurd sexually explicit meaning. Nineties audiences used to applaud when John hit Carol.
Today, however, Posner's production comes across as an accomplished piece about linguistic power relationships, rather than something electric. Eckhart, blazing to maintain the moral high ground, broadcasts his lack of sexual interest like a Trappist monk with a luminous chastity belt. He could — and should — afford more ambiguity. The professor/pupil relationship is potentially full of grey areas, but here it is far too black and white.
Michael Frayn's Democracy provides an infinitely more satisfying portrait of power and schizophrenic motives. Transferring in triumph from the National to the West End, this surprisingly sexy analysis of German Cold War politics brings a Shakespearean complexity to the working relationship between Chancellor Willy Brandt and his personal assistant Go linter Guillaume.
'He always reminds me of meatballs cooked in fat,' Brandt declares of Guillaume before the latter is exposed as an East European spy. 'How can you see into someone's heart if you don't fall a little in love with them?' declares a more besotted Guillaume of Willy, wrestling with the paradox that, while he is betraying the Chancellor, he is also promoting him as a saviour for Eastern Germany.
As the political colossus and the meatball respectively. Roger Allan and Conleth Hill breathe poignant life into the play's central point that democracy is a splintered and imperfect political form that demands chameleon qualities from its champions. By dazzlingly harnessing the theatrical qualities of political showmanship and the dramatic subterfuge of espionage, Frayn has created a true thoroughbred for today's dramatic canon.
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