Cyrano de Bergerac (Crimp) | Concord Theatricals (original) (raw)

★★★★★ “Mesmerising... glittering... unforgettable.” – The Times

★★★★★ “I defy anyone not to fall in love with it.” – The Telegraph

★★★★★ “Funny, thrilling and deeply moving.” – WhatsOnStage

★★★★★ “The most breathtakingly exciting show in London right now.” – Evening Standard

★★★★★ “A beloved tale of yearning, beauty, and desire... a weaponless marvel of language.” – The Observer

“Alive with the love of language... This is not your grand-mère’s Cyrano. Replacing Rostand’s stately 12-syllable alexandrines with jumpier rhythms, its euphemisms with plain speech and its perfect rhymes with ones so slant they serve as italics, Crimp rockets the action to a world drunk on language as it’s actually spoken. It’s also a world in which, as the baker Ragueneau (now a poet, too) predicts, ‘There’s going to be a new force of words’... I spent most of the production’s swift two acts fully engaged in its humor, pathos and fury.” – The New York Times

“A revivifying take on Cyrano. With a whip-smart script by Martin Crimp, the production highlights a cool new vocabulary for Edmond Rostand’s sentimental monument to love.” – The Washington Post

“A pleasure… Adapter Martin Crimp... has, in his sixties, written an absolute banger in his startling adaptation of Rostand.” – Time Out New York

“An alternately joyous and heartrending celebration of language – even the sword fights are rendered with nothing more than pointed words. Every line of dialogue... is either a delight, an arrow, or both, from era-defying comic asides... to a wrenchingly gorgeous profession of love rendered truthfully yet in deception.” – Deadline

“The sexiest, most thrilling production of the season... strips the material down to the essential – the sword by which everyone in its 1640 Paris must live or die: the power of words.” – Theatrely

“Heart-stopping... the program says that the text is a ‘new version’ by Martin Crimp. Yes, well, in the sense that fire can be considered a ‘new version’ of wood.” – Vulture

“This version of the play... is more about Cyrano de Bergerac's first love: language... Crimp updates the language to incorporate more modern poetry, creating a spoken-word rendition set in 1640 that plays with current pop-culture references.” – Entertainment Weekly

★★★★★ “Classics purists will still find the rhyming-couplet poetry of Rostand’s play intact, but Martin Crimp's freewheeling adaptation will also delight the Gen-Z crowd: 19th-century verse gives way to 21st-century spoken-word poetry and rap, including plenty of red-hot roasts.” – New York Theatre Guide