Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand (Derek Jacobi 1985 TV) 16/17

Sinéad Cusack... Roxane
Derek Jacobi... Cyrano de Bergerac
Pete Postlethwaite... Ragueneau
John Bowe... Le Bret
Cathy Finlay... Sister Marthe
Penelope BeaumontMother Marguerite
Alexandra Brook... Sister Claire

Writers:
Edmond Rostand (play)
Anthony Burgess (translation)

Directed by Terry Hands
Original Music by Nigel Hess
Film Editing by David Martin
Production Design by Ralph Koltai
Costume Design by Alexander Reid

Alexander Guy Holborn Spiers writes:

The second means by which Rostand holds the attention of his audiences and makes them willing to listen to his "leçons d'âme" is, as I have said, to "bully" them. In this respect Rostand may be called the Bernard Shaw of the feelings: he does for them what Shaw does for ideas. He bewilders and suggests. He so disconcerts us, he carries us so completely away from ourselves that we lose the habits which in calmer moments orientate our lives. We are at the mercy of the author, and Rostand is then free to excite us, like that other lyric poet, the lark, "to sympathy with hopes and fears" we heeded not. The supreme example of this method is Cyrano.

To the contrasts and extremes practiced by former dramatists, more especially of the Romantic school, Rostand adds the play of a thousand-faceted wit and the nimbleness of a mercurial imagination. Every act, almost every scene, is overlaid with a brilliant, kaleidoscopic network that fascinates.1 The main character, Cyrano, dazzles us by his quick shifts from slap to repartee, from Billingsgate to concetti, pride to humility, coarseness to delicacy, reality to romance. He is love, chivalry, poetry, mirth and courage; he is also poverty, want, abandonment and worldly failure. He is all these things, now so as to form a climax, now in rhythmic alternation, and then again simultaneously (as, for instance, in Ragueneau's shop where the timidity with which he writes of his love to Roxane runs parallel with Ragueneau's account of the audacity with which Cyrano defeated the hundred assassins).

Never before have the emotions of an audience been so diversely played upon, and it is not surprising that, allowed no moment to recover our self-control, we are ready to feel in any way in which the playwright would have us feel: his hero of dreams and immaterial aspirations becomes a man after our own hearts; and even after the performance or the reading, when we have escaped from the magic of Rostand's presentation, there still lingers with us a sufficient glimmer of his vision to shed, temporarily at least, a new light upon life and change our sense of the relative values of our own skepticism and Rostand's idealism.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Rostand
• Cyrano-de-Bergerac
• Derek-Jacobi
• Pete-Postlethwaite
• Sinéad-Cusack
• John-Bowe
• play
• theatre
• theater

[orlandobabe]

Why do you deny it man?! Why?! You are dying and she must have loved you all along deep down.

[dpadden1221]

is there any way to get ahold of a video or cd with the entire show? my dad was in this, and id like to have a copy...

[nitesho]

This is perhaops the best version .I was fortunaate enough to catch this production when they performed on Broadway.