The tradition of French gallantry is still very much alive in France - at least on the stage and screen these days, what with the country's two leading actors both performing the role of the Gascon poet-swashbuckler Cyrano de Bergerac.
For six months this year, Jean-Paul Belmondo delighted capacity audiences at the Theatre Marigny in Paris with his agile, athletic interpretation of the heroic, tragicomic hero of Edmond Rostand. Then Gerard Depardieu hit the screen in the same role in one of the top box office hits of the season and won the Best Actor award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival this May.
Cyrano de Bergerac, whose wittiest verse almost every French lycee student can recite from memory with relish, is perhaps the most poignant piece of drama in the Vast French theatrical repertory. Written close to one hundred years ago by Edmond Rostand, this five-act melodrama is built around the plight of a seventeenth-century musketeer who is quick to take offense at anyone daring to make fun of his most distinctive feature - a nose so grotesquely prominent that Cyrano himself compares it to a rock, to a promontory, even to a "peninsula."
This formidable swordsman is hopelessly in love with his beautiful young cousin Roxane. But she is enamored of a youthful musketeer, Christian de Neuvillette. Cyrano finds himself helping tongue-tied Christian in his wooing by writing love letters for him to Roxane, which shortly results in their marriage. A frustrated admirer, the Comte de Guiche, orders the bridegroom off to war. Christian dies in a skirmish with Spanish soldiers during the siege of Arras (1640). The widowed Roxane retires to a convent, where the still lovesick Cyrano visits her every week until, some fifteen years later, she finally learns from a dying Cyrano who actually wrote those wonderful love letters she has cherished all these years.
If this sounds like a hopelessly implausible plot, then such, it must be admitted, it is. But if literal plausibility is the sole criterion by which a play's worth is to be judged, then think of Shakespeare's delightful comedies - full of travesties and implausible disguises donned by unrecognized cousins, brothers, and sisters.
Sentimental kitsch
If there is an excess of sentimental kitsch in Cyrano de Bergerac, it may well have been because Edmond Rostand, only twenty-eight when he wrote this play, was victim of the cloying bas taste that marked this fin de siecle, illustrated in France by the art pompier of Bouguereau and Bonnencontre.
Rostand himself was so filled with misgivings about his "heroic" tragedicomedy that right up to the last moment he was persuaded that Cyrano de Bergerac was going to be a resounding flop. The very evening of the premiere, staged two days after Christmas of 1897, he implored the leading actor, Constant Coquelin, to forgive him for having dragged him into such a "disastrous venture" (disastrous, among other things, because of the extravagant cost of having to provide five different scenic decors as well as costumes for close to fifty actors and actresses). But Coquelin, a veteran of the Comedie Francaise with almost forty years of theatrical experience behind him, felt no such fears about the larger-than-life role he was being offered, and he
...
Read Full Article
|
