Nigel Barrett, whose credits include There Has Possibly Been An Incident (Royal Exchange Manchester/ SohoTheatre), Richard III – An Arab Tragedy (RSC/Bouffes du Nord) and The Passion with Michael Sheen, and who is a member of the Shunt Collective which recently won The Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2015, will play the lead role in the Royal and Derngate/Northern Stage co-production of Anthony Burgess's version of Edmund Rostand's classic Cyrano de Bergerac which will run in both Northampton and Newcastle.
He is joined by Cath Whitefield (Electra, The Gate, Othello, RSC) as Roxane and Chris Jared (All’s Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, RSC) who completes the love triangle as Christian. The cast also includes John Paul Connolly (Twelfth Night, Richard III, Shakespeare’s Globe, West End and Broadway) as Le Bret/Ligniere and George Potts (1984, Headlong Theatre; The Silver Tassie, National Theatre) as De Guiche/Rageneau.
The Chorus is made up of six emerging performers from Northern Stage’s NORTH scheme—a 21-week paid training programme to support and develop young actors in the north east of England. Kylie Ann Ford, Sisley Henning, Sian Armstrong, Samantha Bell, James Hunter and Matt Howdon will take on dozens of ensemble roles.
Northern Stage's Artistic Director Lorne Campbell directs and Liv Lorent of balletLORENT is movement director.
"Cyrano is scaled up in every way," said Campbell, "not just his nose, but his bravery and his vulnerability, his honour and his self-loathing, his soaring poetry and his profound inarticulacy. This is what I love about the play; it takes that ridiculous deluded mess of a person we all carry around inside ourselves and lets them out onto the stage, bigger and better while also more absurd and crippled than we could ever be."
Cyrano de Bergerac runs at Royal & Derngate, Northampton, from Friday 3 to Saturday 25 April and at Northern Stage from Wednesday 29 April to Saturday 16 May.