INTERVIEW: Adrian Lester on creating romantic hero Cyrano de Bergerac - prosthetic nose and all - for the RSC’s five-star hit show
Born in Birmingham, Adrian Lester, 57, is a multi-award-winning performer. He’s known for seven seasons of the hit TV show Hustle (2004), film roles The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Primary Colors (1998) and his extensive classical work in the theatre playing Othello, Henry V, Rosalind and Hamlet to name but a few. When Herald Arts met with him to discuss his debut appearance for the RSC, taking the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac running at the Swan Theatre until 15th November, he proved to be as sharp, witty and engaging as you would expect.
Last time we spoke – in 2022 when you picked up the Pragnell Birthday award for services to Shakespeare – were you thinking about Cyrano back then?
It was one of those things that was up in the air. It came from my agent, and I thought I’m not sure I want to do theatre right now. So I stepped away from it.
Then about four or five months later I met Simon [director Evans] at a party, and we were talking about theatre and things, and he was just fantastic, we really got on. I said, ‘Look, is there anything you want to do in the theatre? Maybe we could talk about something?’ And he said, actually I was the one who sent you Cyrano de Bergerac.
We first discussed it around 2018 and held onto it. We had no idea whether it was going to go. He had a version, but it needed a lot of work.
It’s your RSC debut – why now?
Timing, as with all these things. As I sit here, there are three things that I’m in discussions with for theatre, and three things that are TV-based that I’m also trying to do. They are all bubbling away.
Also Dan and Tamara approached me – saying ‘Let's talk, what do you want to do?’. They’d already been talking to Simon about Cyrano – and how he’d like me to do it.
The 2019 production with James McAvoy directed by Jamie Lloyd put Cyrano back on everyone’s radar – has that been an influence?
I haven’t seen it done on stage, I've only ever seen two film versions – the Gérard Depardieu one and Steve Martin’s Roxanne.
What’s the appeal of doing it?
I think it’s an amazing story, an amazing character. But I had problems with the original play. As we develop in society and become much more aware, old ways of hanging drama on stories of people and ideas become outdated.
I need to move on from that. And so when we looked at Cyrano, Simon and I sat down and said looked at the red flags. We had to make it matter to everybody once again in a fresh new way.
What were the red flags?
For me, the appearance of Roxane at the war, when she just turns up at the battle. I didn’t believe that.
There were problematic instances around the treatment of Roxane as a character. She was put on the shelf and looked at and desired, but didn’t have agency herself.
We took an honest look at that and said, well, what, what do you think a modern audience would believe?
We dived in and then Simon and Debris [playwright Stevenson] went away and with all their own thoughts and started writing.
Debris is great, she describes herself as ‘a dyslexic writer, Grime poet, hybrid actor and pro-raver’, what has she brought to this?
Simon and I chatted about what we would need to do to make this story the best production possible. And one of the things that we knew we needed to do was that the script had to be a new adaptation.
Simon can write dialogue, but he wanted to collaborate with someone who was better at poetry and language structure. We met a few people and Debris blew us away. She was just brilliant. We both went, ‘Oh God, please, please, please’ – and she agreed to jump on.
She wanted to work in a collaborative way and I stepped back, and they both went to work on the script.
Get the programme and read a bit on poetics and you’ll get a picture of how brilliant she is.
Is the story still fundamentally the same?
The storyline is the same, but it’s progressed: how we note Christian’s beauty; and how we know Cyrano’s feelings about his own sense of inadequacy. We have moved away from you’re either beautiful or ugly; and if you’re beautiful you get this, and if you’re ugly you get that. Those old ideas of marking a person’s character are outdated; we've moved into what people feel about themselves.
So it’s about how Cyrano’s been told from an early age, this is what you are, this is what you’re worth, and this is what you deserve.
People who are what society would term beautiful and attractive will still carry with them something that told them they were ugly when they were a kid. I’ve talked to friends who say this – and they carry that around with them still. So we dig into what was true for a modern audience, all that baggage which is useless.
So the nose is a metaphor for that presumably you don’t need a big prosthetic conk?
A lot of people carry their nose around inside them – that's basically what it is. But I have a nose.
We don’t do a revisionist idea about the text, changing it for a modern audience where you can make it cool and cynical and sort of comment on it as a sort of performance. We have not done that. We’ve dived right into the big-hearted, open-ended love, with poetry and love of language. And theres sword-fighting. We’ve absolutely gone down that road.
Tell us about the setting.
It’s set in a period without being too specific and the costume is a sort of amorphous mix; there is musketeers-type gear.
It’s the most painfully romantic story. How is that playing Cyrano?
It’s fun because he’s funny. He’s witty and dangerous. He spits at the world because he feels the world is immoral and corrupt and full of mendacity. It is full of people holding up ideals for one thing but practising another.
Cyrano does not wish to play by the rules in a world that doesn’t play by the rules.
I haven’t done this kind of comedy before and it’s fun.
It’s the best story of unrequited love that has been written I think.
There are some brilliant Cyrano de Bergerac moments: the whole love letter thing of falling in love with a person’s mind rather than their face, and changing what their idea of beauty is and all of that stuff.
The script has captured these moments – they come quickly though because it’s not a lecture – where Simon and Debris have peppered the story with people learning about affection and learning about love, learning about vulnerability and risk. And it’s just so full of love.
I had a friend come to see it and she said you think it’s this love relationship between Cyrano and Roxane, but actually there are so many loving relationships on stage. A lot of friendship and camaraderie and so many elements where you see people stand up and back each other and open- heartedly say tell me the truth.
It’s a play about love upon which all things are built. That's my quote.
How did you come to the role – did you do loads of research?
It’s strange because over the past eight years I’ve been doing so much research that I’ve forgotten how much research I’ve done. Because: the fencing, the fighting, the honour, army, laying down your life for someone else.
The idea of any armed forces is that they will lay down their life for an innocent that's in danger. So I’ve been attracted very much to news stories of wherever that’s been done, conflicts, things like that.
I’ve been reading more poetry and examining prose and the art of forming sentences and structure.
There’s a lot of discussion about what it means to be male in the modern world about maleness. With Cyrano being such a unique character – a poet but also a military man – without sounding too trite, is he a model for toxic-free masculinity?
There is no message in that sense. We have a history of people who’ve been called up to fight, who are beautiful and sensitive and yet have been on a battlefield.
That is peppered in our understanding of history. But it’s not to shy away from one from the other, it’s when you close down one it finds its avenue out through another.
So if someone is very strong and linear and progressive and so on, but they also feel a lot more sensitively and think a lot more philosopher. If you close down the philosopher and you don’t give an avenue to the sensitivity they will try to find their way out in expression through the force of the linear physical side of the character.
With Cyrano we allow him to be fully alive, so he is a fierce philosopher, a fierce lover and a fierce fighter.
He feels things fiercely and I don’t think for me that that means it's all an intellectual exercise. It’s also an explosion of emotion and feeling because that's who he is.
You mentioned poets and people that fought in the war that wrote poetry – are you thinking of any in particular?
Owen and Sassoon come to mind. For them it was much more a feeling of being lied to, no one prepared them properly for what they were going to face. It was the idea it [World War I battles] was going to be clean and military – harsh in that they would all die and be glorious.
And what they got was sitting beside a dead body for a week and watching it slowly get eaten by rats while they were trying to hold a line and their boots were full of water for days at a time. No one talked about that world and so they were responding feelingly as young men, and poetically to that.
When we think about a person with our conscious mind, we just think about an aspect of one or two things and we become binary about them and we go, well they're this. But actually a person is so many things.
I’ll get off my soapbox quickly, but it’s right for us in the arts to make sure that we continually reflect that back to people.
Because if we don’t, society will just think about people in linear ways and numbers and profit margins and things will close down around us and we have to keep using our elbows to say ‘No, it’s more than that’.
When we spoke before you mentioned coming to do Shakespere roles back at the RSC – are you still up for that?
Definitely I would come back. I did have one role in mind but it’s being done, The Tempest.
That blooming Branagh!
You think of things and then, it’s ‘Oh no, they’ve just done that’. I’m talking to someone about doing something new… There’s all sorts of things.
I grew up in Birmingham, and it does feel like coming home being up here.