Bow gesture
Kenneth Ilurren
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, translated by Christopher Fry (Chichester Festival Theatre) A Touch of Spring by Samuel Taylor (Comedy. Theatre) I'll say one thing for Keith Michell, artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre and more often than not its leading actor: he does not lack the courage of his conceits. Last week, at the opening of the new season, he played Cyrano — as Crewe Alexandra once played Tottenham Hotspur, and with much the same result. When it was mercifully over and the company, some thirty strong, assembled to acknowledge the polite applause of an audience clearly gently bred and decent about such things, it was instantly noted that Michell himself was missing. A sympathetic ripple of concern swept the house. Was he
already prostrate in his
dressing-room? Had he even, in his wretchedness, fled the theatre? Doubt was but momentary. A flight of steps was placed against the balcony of the set, like the gangway placed at the door of an aircraft, for the star to enter and take his bow.
By some scandalous oversight someone had forgotten to drag on a red carpet, but even so it was a gesture from which the late Sir Donald Wolfit himself might have recoiled. That I come thus circuitously to report that Michell did not so recoil is not, as might appear, to send him up rotten, but because this elaborate 'curtain call' he had arranged for himself seemed to me at once to encapsulate the reasons why, on the one hand, he might well have seemed exactly the actor to play Cyrano, and why, on the other, he is not. He has, in short, the heroic flourish and easy flamboyance of this loquacious scaramouche, and has not at all the sense of self-mockery that is his salvation.
The play has to do with a seventeenth-century swordsmanpoet whose extravagant behaviour cloaks an inner embarrassment about his profile — which would excite the envy of an anteater but does not allow him to cherish hopes of success with the fair Roxane, a lady who has enslaved his affections but who herself inclines to a comelier suitor named Christian. Because the latter, though responding ardently, is pathetically inarticulate, Cyrano selflessly puts his own lyrical eloquence at the service of the lad, ghosting his love-letters and even laying on the Gascon blarney in a speech or two beneath the balcony of Roxgme, whose ear is evidently not terribly acute since she fails to recognise Cyrano's voice and takes it that the seductive sentiments she hears are sprouting from the mouth of young Christian.
It is a preposterous tale, but with the right romantic flair and taunting wit waving through it like the plumes of Gascony it can have a blithe and engaging theatricality. That it is so depressingly resistible on this occasion is by no means due wholly to Michell's underwhelming performance. There are strange casting eccentricities, the production lacks grace and fervour, and
though Christopher Fry's translation has some of the enchantments we expect of him, what he has described as his -chiming couplets" have too often the mere jingle of tintinnabula.
The note on Samuel Taylor, in the programme at the Comedy, reminds me that he is the author of such bygone fancies as Sabrina Fair and The Pleasure of His Company, but is curiously reticent about his more recent activities.
suspect, therefore, that
he wrote A Touch of Spring around the same time as those other pieces and cunningly held it back to await our less innocent age when the illicit lovers of romantic comedy can abandon themselves to happy adultery without drawing the wages of sin. While otherwise quantly old-fashioned in style, it is an agreeable trifle about the Rome affair of an American businessman (played by Peter Donat, nephew of Robert, making his first appearance here) and an English actress (Hayley Mills, a constant delight) who are enthusiastically encouraged by a shamelessly bisexual Italian (Leigh Lawson) as soon as he has ascertained that neither is interested in an affair with him. ' Absurd and fragile though it is, it has charm and I wish it well.
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