I have always wondered why slam poets stress their words so bizarrely, as if surprised at themselves, or arguing with a stupid child. The fact that this production by BATS is Martin Crimp’s spoken word version of Cyrano de Bergerac made me recall all my musings about the nature of slam poetry. There is much that is admirable about the best of its avowed commitment to pyrotechnic explosions, its supple navigation of the relationship between poet and poem, authenticity and artifice, on which contemporary written poetry so often neurotically crucifies itself, and, especially, its effective use of jargon, technical language, and the clichés of our emotional lives in all their glitter, their cynical sentimentality.

“When this verse is declaimed as superbly as this, the slam poetry vernacular reveals its speed, vitality and humour”

For me personally, the slightly jarring intonation is caused by the polysyllabic, weak and half-rhymes ubiquitous in slam, which need to be heavily accented if they are not to sound comical. For the greatest revelation of Emma Maiyun’s production of Martin Crimp’s very free translation of Cyrano de Bergerac is that you can instead suit intonation to syntax, going over the line rather than accentuating its end, and thus letting the rhyme-pattern provide a counter-melody rather than the thunderous main tune. When this verse is declaimed like this – and declaimed as superbly as this, by every actor – the slam poetry vernacular reveals its speed, vitality and humour, and also that air of loving words more as an instrument, than for their own sake.

That ambiguity is appropriate for Cyrano de Bergerac, since it is entirely about words, whose ambivalence to them can be summed up in its main conceit. Cyrano (Jacob Benhayoun) is a poet of genius and street brawler whose life is marred by his large, deformed nose. He provides letters, poetry and improvised declarations of love to the pretty but featherbrained Christian – a part Eddie Adams was born to play – to win the beautiful and, in Crimp’s version, intellectually brilliant Roxane (NP Zinger), with whom both are in love, but whom Cyrano believes can never love him back, thanks to the nose. So all that Cyrano writes to her as Christian is both completely true and dismally false; the power of the poetry is undeniable yet morally suspect.

To accentuate this dichotomy perhaps, Maiyun’s actors do not usually take an attitude to their words beyond the simplest physical characterisation – Cyrano slightly stooped, hulking, full of fire; Roxane proud and sharp, if worn down by the end of the play; the villanous De Guiche (Gaby Alberteli) icy-cold, always looking down his nose. Beyond such signs, we are given only the finely but not over-emphatically delivered words.

 “The lines Cyrano speaks, an amalgam of spiritualised love and sexual passion, are delivered by Benhayoun almost in the style of a crooner”

The bare props, stairs, table, chair, two microphones, and non-specific (if bright) costumes, of which Cyrano’s doublet is the only vaguely seventeenth century item, are there to provide a scaffolding for the speech. This is most unexpectedly effective in the famous balcony scene, where Cyrano mouths words to Christian, to say to Roxane above. First Cyrano appears mouthing at one microphone and Christian speaking at the other – then, gradually, as the declarations of love get more intense, Cyrano starts speaking for himself, to Roxane at the other microphone, and Christian moves away.

The lines Cyrano speaks, an amalgam of spiritualised love and sexual passion, are delivered by Benhayoun almost in the style of a crooner, whispering into the microphone, capturings their mixture of wrenching power and tinny falsity. At the crescendo, he repeats “you’re on fire”, “I’m on fire”, as he imagines sex against the wall – even these lines are delivered in the same, passionate but clearly performed way as everything else.

The refusal to overinterpret the play does make for a few problems, though they are inherent in the original work itself. The largest is that everything interesting about it is in the conceit, and so the last two acts are needed only to provide a tragic resolution, albeit a senseless one, since both Christian and Cyrano die more or less randomly. Thus the play comes to seem slightly pointless to an audience, since it is entirely unable to provide any answers to the questions of authenticity in words it sets up.

A metatheatrical beginning, the actors entering with a burst of laughter and excitement to see the play from all sides of the auditorium, along with voiceovers announcing each new act, does not distance the audience, but draws it into a festive artifice which covers over some of these questions – as do the pleasant if not terribly revealing Frantic-Assembly-derived group movement work. But it is a tad unfortunate that, in part due to a choice not to hit the ends of lines, the play is not as funny as it had the potential to be, and thus it seems to suspend its characters between being taken entirely seriously or being ridiculed without particularly deciding which way to go.

The ending, where Cyrano confesses his love to Roxane, but continues writing as he bleeds out, crying ‘the hero must always have the last…the last…the last…’, as she turns away, pushes us back towards the artifice of writing rather than the fires of love. Yet, this comes across as not entirely convincing. In the end, this elegant production both succeeds and falls with the charming superficiality of its original.