What a relief it is that Virginia Gay’s adaptation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac should finally have opened in Sarah Goodes’ production before an exultant crowd at the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Sumner Theatre. This is the production that was pulled hours before it was to open because of Covid and something about the direness of that eleventh-hour measure broke a lot of hearts. Well, now we have a production that brought a predominantly young and eager audience to their feet with a standing ovation and the whole thing was a testament to Virginia Gay’s towering and indomitable professionalism and her ability, over and over, to look disaster in the face and keep going.

Cyrano is one of the better plays ever written and there’s something irresistible about the tragicomic story, the supreme romantic poignancy of this play about the plain guy, the character actor with the nose, who gives the brainless young hunk Christian the words to woo Roxanne, who falls in love with the language of Cyrano. Jose Ferrer won an Oscar for his performance in the film, Depardieu set the international seal on his reputation as the great French actor of his generation with his movie and Peter Dinklage has used his diminutive stature as a potent metaphor. Ralph Richardson, the Falstaff not the Hamlet of his generation, put his signature on the role like a royal seal.

Virginia Gay belongs in their company. It’s a delight to see an actor with this kind of authority, the sheer panache and presence she brings to her characterisation of Cyrano, the mastery of diction, the ability to deliver a joke with perfect expressionless dryness, and the other, the opposite thing, the ability to articulate wanly and without any excess of emphasis the fundamental lovelessness of someone who thinks she will forever be the mate, never the lover.

This is an adaptation of Rostand’s play which Gay with characteristic audacity has reconfigured to make it into a kind of sapphic rom-com. But she ensures, as she would, that the shadowlines and the sorrow, the conviction of predestined solitude and desolation, are indelibly indicated – more so indeed, than in David Wenham’s Cyrano fifteen or so years ago with Asher Keddie – even though the ultimate happy ending is delicious when it comes and manages to preserve the lilt of the unexpected even though we know it’s coming.

And never mind the rejig. As Peter Brook said once of Brecht’s rewrite of Coriolanus the original text is not burnt. This is in part a kind of play within a play Cyrano and it comes with a frisky, sportive mini-chorus given to frolics of song and dance. And it’s marvellous when Virginia Gay, who took Australian theatre by storm when she did a very un-Doris Day Calamity Jane, actually permits herself to break into song. Hark, the herald angel sings. But then the Virginia Gay/Sarah Goodes production turns everything on its head with a sort of lassooing sense of magic. You think for a stretch that you’re in the vicinity of poor theatre as if the plague had reduced everything to a gesture but then Goodes will string lights across the stage in a row and everything becomes circus-like and carnivalesque. There’s a log of a Christian (Yan in the production) Claude Jabbour who says he can’t be a Greek god, he’d have to be a Lebanese god, which somehow comes across as utterly wacky. Tuuli Narkle as Roxanne looks disconcerting and notably big in leopard skin tights until the penny drops that this cushiony appearance is ministering to a girl-on-girl eroticism in very deliberate defiance of straight norms. And besides, this Roxanne is pretty, pert, and offended by the way Cyrano assumes her lack of interest. There is a sharper note of erotic anger and of waves of love than we see very often in the depiction of lesbian wooing and the way in which Gay and Goodes use the mutation of this very classic romantic paradigm as their platform for this revelatory metamorphosis is both charged with danger and – in its rather shiver-inducing way – very satisfying.

So never mind the loss of musketeer hats and plumes and Rostand’s conjunction of love and war, this is a Cyrano to see and cheer on.

It was also good to behold the vast crowd of thesps who had come to this delayed opening. There was Marg Downey, redoubtable trouper that she is, who’s been appearing in The Newsreader which has got its second series with Sam Reid as the young male lead. Reid, who has done all sorts of things on stage and screen in Britain including that summit of a Jacobean tragedy – was it T.S. Eliot who said it was the greatest thing of its kind outside of Shakespeare? – The Changeling. Reid will get to use all his command of technique, ancient and modern, because he’s just got the plum role, the Tom Cruise one, in the streamer version of Interview with a Vampire. In a world of shape-changing sexualities in Cyrano – and following in the wake of his Newsreader character who is bisexual – there is an overtly gay characterisation of the vampire Lestat in the new version of Anne Rice’s story which started on Sunday October 2.

Amid the throng for Cyrano the other night – with the multitude of young Virginia Gay fans – there were old-timers like Nadine Garner and Richard Piper. A lifetime ago Melbourne saw Garner in Genet’s masterpiece The Balcony and Piper play the title role in Shakespeare’s Henry IV about as well as an actor could. They are both together with Virginia Gay in the new ABC streamer Savage River, a bush thriller full of dark and deadly deeds, in which Gay plays a tough, forthright detective – and mother of a troubled teenage daughter – with an absolute directness and understatement great to see.

Savage River is directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse with a stunning characterisation of the girl who’s been to jail for murder from Katherine Langford.

Her power as an actress is matched by her beauty and her face can insinuate its way into the most classic fiction you read. Stardom awaits.