It is not hard to see why Alexis Michalik’s play has clocked up more than 700 performances in Paris. The piece is both a farcical comedy about Edmond Rostand’s anguished creation of Cyrano de Bergerac and a love letter to the chaotic absurdity of theatre. You could see it as a Gallic equivalent of Shakespeare in Love but, for all the deftness of Jeremy Sams’s translation and the vigour of Roxana Silbert’s production, I doubt it will resonate as strongly in a culture less hooked on Rostand’s romantic classic.
The joke is that Rostand is a failed playwright who transforms his life into art, and endows Cyrano with the panache he privately lacks. When he helps out an actor chum by penning love letters on his behalf to a wardrobe mistress, he discovers the key to the play he is struggling to write. Rostand’s proxy wooing leads to marital mayhem and frantic farce in the spirit of Georges Feydeau, who appears as a peripheral character. It makes for hectic fun and there are some surprisingly crude gags – especially one about a bad actor turning into a good one through the loss of his virginity – but a wayward approach to fact is typified by a joke about Chekhov disdaining to enter a brothel because he was a married man. In 1897, he was actually still a bachelor.
The chief pleasure lies in the kaleidoscopic theatricality of the production and the performances. Freddie Fox makes Rostand a charmingly harassed hero who, against overwhelming odds, creates a hit. As Coquelin, who commissioned the piece and played Cyrano, Henry Goodman wittily embodies the egotistic bravura one associates with famous French actors. Josie Lawrence pops up briefly as Sarah Bernhardt – “a monument no one wants to visit any more” – and a number of minor figures, and there is good support from Delroy Atkinson as an enlightened cafe owner and from David Langham as a host of celebrities ranging from Georges Méliès to Maurice Ravel. But it says much about a somewhat strenuous romp that the real highlight is seeing a brave actor, Robin Morrissey, fall backwards off an overturned ladder.
At Birmingham rep until 30 March. Then touring until 4 May.
