The R.S.C.'s Rhapsody in Brown

By RICHARD CORLISS

CYRANO DE BERGERAC by Edmond Rostand

The actor finds a beguiling blend of character study and star quality. The director and designer devise different strategies that can serve a single stage. The company struts its chameleon craft, and the audience relishes a smorgasbord of theater history. Such are the pleasures of repertory, especially as executed by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. In its City home at the Barbican Theater in London, or on its country estate at Stratford-upon-Avon, the R.S.C. may perform as many as five plays a week. The company's tours of North America, though, have displayed only a fraction of its versatility: one play at a time. So the R.S.C.'s twin bill of Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac, now on Broadway for a ten-week run, offers the American theatergoer a rare opportunity to see the world's top rep company in its element -- an "at home" abroad.

This applies even when (especially when) one production is sublime and the other soso. Much Ado thrills the senses with its fairy-tale weave of love, honor and wit. Cyrano is a lesser play and a lesser production, a theatrical war horse that keeps buckling at the knees. Yet Cyrano is a more typical Royal Shakespeare evening. The capacious stage of the Gershwin Theater teems with actors and activity; Ralph Koltai's set is brownish, broody, tattered just so; the tone of the crowd scenes is strenuously raunchy; during the battle scene, cannon fire pops your eardrums, and the R.S.C. smoke machine wafts its fumes across the orchestra seats; the whole production looks to be illuminated by a 20-watt bulb. To see this ensemble devote itself with patented bustle to Cyrano is to feel the comfortable but unsatisfying sensation of watching a favorite dog do old tricks.

Not that the play is unworthy of resuscitation. Edmond Rostand was 29 when he wrote Cyrano; he seasoned this tale of a 17th century cavalier with the dash, sweep, idealism and tireless eloquence of youth. In 1898, when the original French production played London, it arrived like a gust of rose-scented air in the stolid cathedral of naturalism. Proclaimed Critic Max Beerbohm: "Even if Cyrano be not a classic, it is at least a wonderfully ingenious counterfeit of one." And even if, in this century, the counterfeit has become more evident than the ingenuity, Rostand's rhapsody has attracted new generations of star actors, from Walter Hampden to Ralph Richardson to Jose Ferrer in the Oscar-winning film version. But the movie ran only 112 min.; the R.S.C. Cyrano soldiers on at nearly twice that length. More important, Anthony Burgess's verse translation, while lean and clever ("Our devil's changed into a Christian brother,/ Attack one nostril and he turns the other"), irons out the swellings of Rostand's perfervid rhetoric. The direction, by Terry Hands, who also staged Much Ado, is as antiromantic as the translation. It retreats from the play's signal qualities: passion and panache.

On the three most famous set pieces--Cyrano's duel while composing a poem, the balcony scene in which the shy cavalier ventriloquizes his love for Roxane (Sinead Cusack) through the voice of his friend Christian (Tom Mannion), and Cyrano's lingering death--Hands does go full throttle. So does the star, Derek Jacobi, in the rising-geyser cadences that just about every serious English actor of the past 20 years has borrowed from Laurence Olivier. In his best roles Jacobi finds heroism in gray ordinariness: the stammering honesty of Claudius in TV's I, Claudius, the grace and pain beneath the raillery in Much Ado. But Cyrano is extraordinary, unique; his heart and his compulsive excellence set him apart from other mortals more than his prominent proboscis. Jacobi, for all his energetic resourcefulness, has neither the swagger nor the stature for the part. He commandeers the stage with his ambition to fill the role, but his shortcomings are as plain as the nose on Cyrano's face. --By Richard Corliss