Cyrano de Bergerac: An Appreciation
Cyrano de Bergerac is not a great play, merely a perfect one. The distinction is worth noting. Great plays struggle with materials so intractable, explore terrain so uncharted, attempt things so truly impossible, that parts of them inevitably resist emcompassing by the author, let alone by the audience. In Cyrano, however, the playwright is always in full control. The profile of every act is a swiftly rising action, a succession of ever more resounding climaxes, ending with a perfect punch line. The contour of the whole play, on the other hand, is a parabola reaching its peak with the fourth act, then falling away into the bittersweet denouement of the quietly heartrending fifth act.
But that is only part of the perfection. Almost every action in Cyrano is a gesture, a beau geste; almost every utterance a tirade of remarkable bravura or an epigram scintillant with irony. This to the accompaniment of the alexandrine handled with self-assured ease and elasticity, the verse never ceasing to further the dramatic development while maintaining many of the graces of intimate lyric poetry. Riposte after riposte hits relentlessly though charmingly home. In short, the play has, like its hero, a little too much panache, which proves, however gallantly, the undoing of both.
Unfortunately, no English translation of Edmond Rostand's 1897 play, however conscientious, can equal much of the marvelously punning wit and a good deal of the pointed concision and syntactical symmetry of the French. The current Broadway revival, with Kevin Kline in the title role, uses an adaptation by the late Anthony Burgess. A distinguished novelist, Burgess was not a born playwright; when he bothers to translate in rhyme, he favors the less pointed a-b-a-b kind rather than the traditional French rhyming hexameter couplets, often cunningly subdivided among characters. But even in Burgess' rather severely cut version, the play is supremely actable.
[IMG:R]And what pure theater there is in the various scenes: an uproarious play-within-a-play scene, a duel as good as any on the stage, a balcony scene second only to Romeo and well ahead of Pelléas, a battle sequence as rousing as anything this side of the movies—and any number of scenes full of moonstruck foolhardiness, heroic self-abnegation or noble dying. But for all this unabashed theatricality, Cyrano is not a mere escapist divertissement. In escapism, the good, or most of them, emerge triumphant and happy, while the villains are punished. Here, however, everybody suffers, every longing remains unfulfilled, and success, such as De Guiche's, scarcely differs from failure, such as Cyrano's.
This underlying melancholy is redeemed by incomparable verve, pluck and wit. Like Ragueneau, Rostand is a master poet-confectioner, magisterially blending pathos and humor, absurdity and common sense, abstention from felicity and affirmation of life. Everyone can find something in Cyrano: There is enough romance for the sentimentalist, enough wit and worldly wisdom for the unsentimental and enough exemplary construction for those capable of apprehending form with their fingertips.
As noted, Cyrano offers splendid opportunities for the actors to shine, for set and costume designers to dazzle and for audiences to empathize with characters rich in delightful virtues and no less delightful flaws. It is rather more theater than literature, but in that honorably second category the play has not been surpassed; its popularity continues undimmed since its first performance. In fact, Cyrano can be said to finish ahead of many more ambitious efforts by a nose, a long nose. I think it will always be as much a part of the life of our theater as it is of the imaginary theater of our inner life.