New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Christian Edwards makes an absorbing hero in this swaggering adaptation of Rostand’s tale, featuring some brilliant baroque music
Northern Broadsides has built its reputation on no-nonsense productions of Shakespeare. But in recent years, the company has developed an equally impressive strand of foreign-language adaptations, created by the husband-and-wife team of writer Deborah McAndrew and director/composer Conrad Nelson.
The McAndrew-Nelson modus operandi is generally to set a European classic in the back yard of JB Priestley or Shameless’s Frank Gallagher: they have transplanted Gogol’s Government Inspector to a West Riding council chamber and Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide to a sink estate. Its version of Edmond Rostand’s verse drama remains firmly where Rostand set it, however, among a mid-17th-century Parisian milieu of musketeers, cardinals and poetry-loving pastry cooks.
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