Jack McGee
The Cyranoid was originally produced as a Te Herenga Waka 300 level production paper in 2023. It has had a re-staging, mostly by the original team, in Te Auaha’s Tapere Nui theatre as part of NZ Fringe 2024. It's impossible to fully remove Cyranoid from its University paper context.
To review it and not acknowledge that would be disingenuous. We expect and look for different things from a company paper than from a Fringe show. Simultaneously, to treat it purely as a student work is to belittle it. Festival audience-goers are attending this expecting a Fringe show. To be clear, this is Fringe - we're not talking Aotearoa Festival of the Arts expectations here - but with the capable hand of original lecturer and renowned creative Nicola Hyland guiding the project, it’s reasonable to expect a work of some substance here. Something which has, if not a level of polish, bold ideas that push boundaries. In reviewing Cyranoid I intend to approach it from both perspectives. This isn't in the intent to pull punches, but more to accurately summarise the roots and functions of the work.
Broadly an adaptation of Cyrano De Bergerac (a play from the late 1800s, based broadly on the eponymous man’s real life), the Cyranoid tells the story of a stilted love triangle where a noble-woman named Roxanne (Ava O'Brien) falls in love with Christian (Ethan Cranefield), a young soldier who's easy on the eye but useless with words. Roxanne's close friend, Cyrano (Alex Quinn), is a man of immense talent and wit, but unattractive to Roxanne and ends up writing love letters to her on Christian's behalf. It's a story often retold, most recently in Joe Wright's frustratingly lifeless movie-musical Cyrano (2021), starring Peter Dinklage in the titular role. Of course, this production of The Cyranoid puts a sci-fi spin on it. According to the program, the show is named after "The Cyranoid Method", a psychological experiment "where a hybrid persona is created using the text of one person generated from the body of another ''. The reason Cyrano is unattractive to Roxanne? He's a 'bio-automaton' created by Leonardo Da-Vinci! These bio-automatons largely make up a lower class, exploited, and sent to war by the villainous bourgeois. Final layer, the whole thing is set in 18th century France and robotic revolution is in the air.
Tonally, The Cyranoid largely plays as a farce. I think the easiest comparison point is the film Moulin Rouge (2001). High energy, vulgar, lurid, shamelessly contemporary (a character literally says "Slay!" in The Cyranoid), yet ultimately tragic-romantic. Much like Rouge, Cyranoid is also sort of a musical? Characters stop and sing songs every now and then. Some are taken from pop culture, but unlike Rouge largely the music is original (composed by musical director/co-director Nate Smyth). I describe Cyranoid as "sort of a musical", as most of the songs are very short, generally playing as half a musical number. The instrumentation of the backing tracks is sparse, and while there's plenty of strong musical moments or pieces of choreography, they tend to feel like an afterthought. This makes sense, as The Cyranoid is so bursting with ideas that I can't imagine the songs going much longer without the play fully collapsing under its own weight.
The show was written collaboratively, with all members of the original team contributing to the creation of characters and ideas. This is strongly felt in the show. Every minor character feels designed to give the performer their moment in the limelight. Viewed from the lens of a student production, this makes a lot of sense. You're making sure everyone gets the most out of the course, and that their individual voices and perspectives are heard and reflected in their character. Viewing this outside of that lens, it contributes towards my biggest issues with the show - a lack of clarity, coherence, or a clear perspective. Here, Hyland has prioritised creating a truly collaborative process over creating a cohesive show - and there’s good and bad to that. Part of the bad being that the bulk of my viewing experience involved watching these minor characters repeat their individual (presumably self-devised by the performer) bits, which are often as simple as 'big moustache' or 'doesn't know wife is cheating on him with big moustache' while yelling angry things about the world.
The Cyranoid is a shotgun of ideas. At its heart, is a functional love story, heavily carried by Quinn, who is an astoundingly charismatic performer, but this feels like it takes up only a quarter of the show. The rest of the nearly two hour long run time is spent with supporting characters who I have no reason to care about, barely dragging me through an increasingly incoherent plot while being various shades of horny and angry. And horny is okay! It's often well executed and funny, and it makes total sense for one of these courses. If all your actors are falling in love offstage, may as well capture some of that energy onstage. It doesn't require me to understand much context other than "oh he doesn't know his wife is cheating on him in that violently shaking patissiere caravan".
Angry is harder. I can tell you that The Cyranoid is angry about A.I., and classism, and maybe war. However, I cannot tell you exactly what it wants to say about those things. I also don't think it's really asking any questions about them either. At one point, we get French flag lighting and a ‘vivre la France’ moment, and I find myself collapsing into my chair. The real tragedy of what is happening in France right now, with its unbelievable poverty and police violence, can't help but come to mind as I'm watching goofy Les Mis with robots. If you don't want me to think about real class divide and pain in France, don't make your show about that. If you do want to make it about that, maybe do something more with it than play dress up.
One of the creative seeds of this show was the observation that "AI technology is threatening to colonise our creativity." Strong seed. I see this nowhere in the show. Our cyborg characters are fully sympathetic, essentially humans, who are essentially superficially robotic. There's strong makeup and costuming done to differentiate them (designed by Callie Chinery-Tompkins and Pan Clark), and Cyrano has an incredibly annoying ticking sound play through the sound system whenever he's on stage. The efforts to tie together “the Cyranoid Method '' with Cyrano the character are surface level at best. If the rich colonised the creativity of the poor by turning them into robots, this idea is thoroughly unexplored. If Cyrano's exceptional letter writing ability comes purely from being a robot, the show seems largely unconcerned with it. If I'm meant to read him as Chat GPT and Christian as the person using it, I feel really bad for Chat GPT, and I can’t imagine that’s the intent. I'm as terrified about A.I. as every other artist, I’m mortified about how it’s going to somehow make the wealth divide even larger, and about what it means for artists. It's frustrating to me to not see these ideas debated or meaningfully engaged with by the text.
This incoherence extends out of the ideas of the play and into its form. Vocal projection is a huge issue. I'm sitting in the back row, and while characters are occasionally mic'd (largely for songs), there are countless lines I miss because they're said too quietly. When I am able to listen, it's often difficult to process what I'm hearing and seeing as it's tonally inconsistent. There's a tedious lore dump about Da Vinci and his robotic creations, there's genuine high-school-drama-class-slow-mo-fight-choreo, and there's a variety of characters predominantly characterised by continuously holding their hands in one vaguely dramatic pose.
In short, it feels like a show written by a dozen people. At its best, a farce like this should make me feel like I'm in on the fun with the performers. They're having a great time performing it, and I want to enjoy that with them. But with the exception of the core love triangle, The Cyranoid seems to work to push us further and further away, distancing us from the increasingly isolated world the performers are inhabiting with each other. As a creative process for a group of students, it appears accommodating and widely inclusive. As a Fringe show, it's a slog with little to say.
Broadly an adaptation of Cyrano De Bergerac (a play from the late 1800s, based broadly on the eponymous man’s real life), the Cyranoid tells the story of a stilted love triangle where a noble-woman named Roxanne (Ava O'Brien) falls in love with Christian (Ethan Cranefield), a young soldier who's easy on the eye but useless with words. Roxanne's close friend, Cyrano (Alex Quinn), is a man of immense talent and wit, but unattractive to Roxanne and ends up writing love letters to her on Christian's behalf. It's a story often retold, most recently in Joe Wright's frustratingly lifeless movie-musical Cyrano (2021), starring Peter Dinklage in the titular role. Of course, this production of The Cyranoid puts a sci-fi spin on it. According to the program, the show is named after "The Cyranoid Method", a psychological experiment "where a hybrid persona is created using the text of one person generated from the body of another ''. The reason Cyrano is unattractive to Roxanne? He's a 'bio-automaton' created by Leonardo Da-Vinci! These bio-automatons largely make up a lower class, exploited, and sent to war by the villainous bourgeois. Final layer, the whole thing is set in 18th century France and robotic revolution is in the air.
Tonally, The Cyranoid largely plays as a farce. I think the easiest comparison point is the film Moulin Rouge (2001). High energy, vulgar, lurid, shamelessly contemporary (a character literally says "Slay!" in The Cyranoid), yet ultimately tragic-romantic. Much like Rouge, Cyranoid is also sort of a musical? Characters stop and sing songs every now and then. Some are taken from pop culture, but unlike Rouge largely the music is original (composed by musical director/co-director Nate Smyth). I describe Cyranoid as "sort of a musical", as most of the songs are very short, generally playing as half a musical number. The instrumentation of the backing tracks is sparse, and while there's plenty of strong musical moments or pieces of choreography, they tend to feel like an afterthought. This makes sense, as The Cyranoid is so bursting with ideas that I can't imagine the songs going much longer without the play fully collapsing under its own weight.
The show was written collaboratively, with all members of the original team contributing to the creation of characters and ideas. This is strongly felt in the show. Every minor character feels designed to give the performer their moment in the limelight. Viewed from the lens of a student production, this makes a lot of sense. You're making sure everyone gets the most out of the course, and that their individual voices and perspectives are heard and reflected in their character. Viewing this outside of that lens, it contributes towards my biggest issues with the show - a lack of clarity, coherence, or a clear perspective. Here, Hyland has prioritised creating a truly collaborative process over creating a cohesive show - and there’s good and bad to that. Part of the bad being that the bulk of my viewing experience involved watching these minor characters repeat their individual (presumably self-devised by the performer) bits, which are often as simple as 'big moustache' or 'doesn't know wife is cheating on him with big moustache' while yelling angry things about the world.
The Cyranoid is a shotgun of ideas. At its heart, is a functional love story, heavily carried by Quinn, who is an astoundingly charismatic performer, but this feels like it takes up only a quarter of the show. The rest of the nearly two hour long run time is spent with supporting characters who I have no reason to care about, barely dragging me through an increasingly incoherent plot while being various shades of horny and angry. And horny is okay! It's often well executed and funny, and it makes total sense for one of these courses. If all your actors are falling in love offstage, may as well capture some of that energy onstage. It doesn't require me to understand much context other than "oh he doesn't know his wife is cheating on him in that violently shaking patissiere caravan".
Angry is harder. I can tell you that The Cyranoid is angry about A.I., and classism, and maybe war. However, I cannot tell you exactly what it wants to say about those things. I also don't think it's really asking any questions about them either. At one point, we get French flag lighting and a ‘vivre la France’ moment, and I find myself collapsing into my chair. The real tragedy of what is happening in France right now, with its unbelievable poverty and police violence, can't help but come to mind as I'm watching goofy Les Mis with robots. If you don't want me to think about real class divide and pain in France, don't make your show about that. If you do want to make it about that, maybe do something more with it than play dress up.
One of the creative seeds of this show was the observation that "AI technology is threatening to colonise our creativity." Strong seed. I see this nowhere in the show. Our cyborg characters are fully sympathetic, essentially humans, who are essentially superficially robotic. There's strong makeup and costuming done to differentiate them (designed by Callie Chinery-Tompkins and Pan Clark), and Cyrano has an incredibly annoying ticking sound play through the sound system whenever he's on stage. The efforts to tie together “the Cyranoid Method '' with Cyrano the character are surface level at best. If the rich colonised the creativity of the poor by turning them into robots, this idea is thoroughly unexplored. If Cyrano's exceptional letter writing ability comes purely from being a robot, the show seems largely unconcerned with it. If I'm meant to read him as Chat GPT and Christian as the person using it, I feel really bad for Chat GPT, and I can’t imagine that’s the intent. I'm as terrified about A.I. as every other artist, I’m mortified about how it’s going to somehow make the wealth divide even larger, and about what it means for artists. It's frustrating to me to not see these ideas debated or meaningfully engaged with by the text.
This incoherence extends out of the ideas of the play and into its form. Vocal projection is a huge issue. I'm sitting in the back row, and while characters are occasionally mic'd (largely for songs), there are countless lines I miss because they're said too quietly. When I am able to listen, it's often difficult to process what I'm hearing and seeing as it's tonally inconsistent. There's a tedious lore dump about Da Vinci and his robotic creations, there's genuine high-school-drama-class-slow-mo-fight-choreo, and there's a variety of characters predominantly characterised by continuously holding their hands in one vaguely dramatic pose.
In short, it feels like a show written by a dozen people. At its best, a farce like this should make me feel like I'm in on the fun with the performers. They're having a great time performing it, and I want to enjoy that with them. But with the exception of the core love triangle, The Cyranoid seems to work to push us further and further away, distancing us from the increasingly isolated world the performers are inhabiting with each other. As a creative process for a group of students, it appears accommodating and widely inclusive. As a Fringe show, it's a slog with little to say.