The Fringe Five | Virginia Gay

Virginia Gay is already well known in her native Australia, having starred in the series dramas All Saints, Winners & Losers and Savage River, and appeared on reality show Dancing with the Stars last year. She has toured three solo cabaret shows, too – one of which, Dirty Pretty Songs, came to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012. In 2018 she won a Sydney Theatre award for her performance in a musical adaptation of Calamity Jane.

Now, Gay is about to become well known in Britain, too, thanks to the success of her debut play Cyrano, at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

A modern-day adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (the one about the chap whose romantic endeavours are foiled by his remarkably large nose), the play premiered in Melbourne in 2021, then returned the following year. Its celebrated run at the Traverse Theatre during this festival, in a new staging directed by Clare Watson, was its European premiere.

‘A moving and joyful contemplation of the emotional angst of loving someone from a body you feel you do not belong in’

The outline of Rostand’s original is visible, but Gay rebrands all the characters – casting herself as a queer, female, normal-nosed Cyrano – and, in a master stroke, has them construct the play for themselves, interrogating it as they go. She stuffs it full of music, slapstick and meta-theatrical humour, too, and the result is a moving and joyful contemplation of the emotional angst of loving someone from a body you feel you do not belong in.

London audiences will get to enjoy it when it arrives at the Park Theatre in December.