Cyrano de Bergerac, C’est Nous!

Last night I saw the NT Live Broadcast of Rostand’s play, new translation by Martin Crimp. ( I haven’t seen Hamilton, but I strongly suspect the kinda “rap-rhyme” style of the text owes a lot to that influential work.)

Cyrano, a swordsman, poet, intellectual extraordinaire, is in love with his cousin Roxanne. But he thinks she could never love him because he’s so ugly: he has a big nose . If the nose of the adorable James McAvoy was enhanced at all in this production, I really couldn’t tell, but it doesn’t matter; Cyrano KNOWS his nose is an insuperable obstacle to his happiness; ça suffit.

As I’m sure you know, Roxanne engages in an epistolary romance with Christian, a beautiful ignoramus, her passion inflamed by the eloquent, poetic letters he sends her— of which Cyrano is the author. There’s a balcony scene where Christian, forced to actually speak to Roxanne, panics and has to rely on Cyrano to feed him the language of passion. (And boy, does he! I nearly fainted during this scene. Fortunately, we were in a “Movie Tavern” which means you can get dinner ‘n’drinks delivered to your seat and the chairs recline almost flat, so the paramedics werent needed). Then Christian, a member of Cyrano’s regiment, is killed in action, and for 15 years Cyrano honorably allows Roxanne to cherish her delusion, only revealing to her as he’s dying that he wrote the letters she has treasured all this time.

In the previous version I saw,Roxanne cries angrily , “Now I must mourn you twice!” In Crimp’s translation, she asks, “Did I love two men—or no man at all?”

When we blog, we’re enamored of each others’ written personae, aren’t we? We’re like Cyrano and Roxanne, who are actually made for each other because both worship words. If we all met, would our attraction survive the shock of confrontation with our respective corporeal realities?

I don’t know…and I don’t care, my dear interlocutors. Talk to me! Enchant me with your keyboards, I will never ask for more. As Yeats wrote:

“But oh, sick children of the world,/Of all the many changing things/In dreary dancing past us hurled/To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,/Words alone are certain good./ …The wandering Earth herself may be/Only a sudden, flaming word/In clanging space a moment heard/Troubling the endless reverie.”