Let’s start with the elephant in the room so to speak. The nose is a corker. It looks right without being absurd, a genuine cross to bear through one’s life without making it necessary to hide under a rock. However as the misquote from Nietzsche goes, ’What doesn’t break you, makes you’, in this highly approachable and affectionate adaption by, Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson, Cyrano has mastered everything he has turned his hand to, from fighting to poetry – save one, the art of speaking directly from the heart to the object of his unspoken love.

Adrian Lester is superb, the mantle of Cyrano’s achievements sit comfortably on his shoulders. The martial prowess and the sensitive, flexible mind are comfortably contained in his dominating stage presence. Is he a soldier who does poetry or a poet who turns soldier in order to survive? The young boy, the little Cyrano who weaves his way through the play doesn’t help answer the question, but it is an unimportant one. Mr Lester gives a performance of great variety and sympathy. We want him to be discovered in the balcony scene, we ache for the tenderness of the blindfold ‘kiss’ to unlock a dam of emotion.

Roxanne loves not a physical, living man, but the idea of a perfect lover. The great irony of the play is that he was there in her life all the time. In this version she is a modern girl, unconventional, forthright. In love with the idea of love, she wants to be ‘undressed by vocabulary’ and tries to browbeat the hapless Neuvillette – who is mistaken for something he is not – into her ideal. Susannah Fielding’s Roxanne, attractive, peart and demanding, is in every fibre a woman worthy of the love of a good man.

The trio of strolling players that Cyrano ‘won’ become a projection of his sensitive side, an alter ego that ironically allow him to remain mute when it really matters. The director, Simon Evans, uses them to good effect. His handling of the famous scenes, the balcony and the kiss are sensitive and tense. The language in each is heartfelt without being ostentatiously florid and is delivered with a sincerity that breaks free of Cyrano’s crippling diffidence. The handling of the battle scenes is unsentimental and compact and Cyrano’s death is as moving as anything one has seen on the stage in recent memory.

The play is a glorious testament to the power of words and Polonius’ injunction, ‘To thine own self be true’.