Edmond Rostand’s great romantic has drawn actors including Ralph Richardson, Antony Sher and James McAvoy to its lead role. It is a tale of glorious theatricality, glittering poetry and heroic self-sacrifice
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is never far away. In February Martin Crimp’s radical adaptation, starring James McAvoy, returns to London, then tours to Glasgow and New York. Then follows the release of Joe Wright’s new movie, with Peter Dinklage in the lead. Although in both cases the actors eschew prosthetic adornments, you could say that the noses generally have it since Rostand’s “comédie héroïque” has been in regular revival since its 1897 premiere. I’ve seen close to a dozen productions over the past half-century and it’s been the source of multiple movies, at least three musicals and an opera. There was also in 2015 a gender-swapped version known as CyranA.
So why does it endure? At its premiere, it was seen as a revolt against the prevailing naturalist drama. As Graham Robb has pointed out, it also had a topical resonance, coming at the time of the Dreyfus affair (the scandal in which army captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason): “the soft-hearted slasher was everybody’s hero – a man with alien features who suffered for his virtues but represented the society Dreyfus was supposed to have betrayed”. But there are other reasons for its continued popularity: it has a glorious theatricality, glittering poetry and boasts a big star part that has attracted actors as various as Ralph Richardson, Derek Jacobi and Antony Sher on stage and José Ferrer, Steve Martin and Gérard Depardieu on screen.
