Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand (Derek Jacobi 1985 TV) 13/17

John Carlisle... Le Comte de Guiche
Sinéad Cusack... Roxane
Tom Mannion... Christian de Neuvillette
Derek Jacobi... Cyrano de Bergerac
John Bowe... Le Bret
Ken Bones... Carbon de Castel Jaloux
Richard Clifford... Gascony Cadet
Robert Clare... Gascony Cadet
Philip Dennis... Gascony Cadet
John Tramper... Gascony Cadet
Niall Padden... Gascony Cadet
Phillip Walsh... Gascony Cadet
Simon Clark... Gascony Cadet
David Shaw Parker... Gascony Cadet
Christopher Bowen... Gascony Cadet

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 great characteristic of Rostand's attitude towards the world he lives in consists of two things: a conviction of the necessity of what has recently been called "the lyric life," and a feeling that the average man fails to appreciate this necessity. To recognize this fact is to dispose once for all of the erroneous statement made by some critics that Rostand was out of touch with the aspirations of his day. Like the true poet that he was, he anticipated, reflecting it in his own particular way, a state of mind which has become more manifest since the epoch in which he wrote; and it may further be added that he did not stand completely alone among the spirits of his own times.

It is true that Rostand had no immediate associates working in exactly the same manner as he. He was the disciple of no one master, the center of no group of contemporaries and the founder of no important school. At the moment when he was finding himself, crystallizing these characteristics which were to appear in his more important works, there were no dramatists with whom he could be entirely in sympathy. On the one hand, he was by temperament, as we have already seen, incapable of sharing the moral and social preoccupations and the theatrical conventions that lingered on in the dramas of Sardou, Augier and Dumas fils; and he could have no liking either for the formless brutalities of much that was being performed at the Théatre Libre. Such determinism and such naturalism were alike distasteful to the immaterial singer of the power of dreams quand même.

On the other hand, the efforts at renovation made by more imaginative and idealistic dramatists and producers, were only slightly more congenial to him. For he was an eclectic: his excellent education had impressed him, as the reminiscences appearing throughout his writings show, with the beauties of authors belonging to very different periods of French literature from d'Urfé and Scarron to Gautier and Hugo. He thus had little love for the abnormal, un- French experiments of the Théâtre d'Art and the Théâtre de l'Œuvre: the phantasms of Maeterlinck were as unsatisfying to his mind as the somber dread of Ibsen was galling to his spirit.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Rostand
• Cyrano-de-Bergerac
• Derek-Jacobi
• John-Carlisle
• Sinéad-Cusack
• play
• theatre
• theater

[jillmattz]

Mr Ken Bones looks very different in this than he does in Jack the Ripper with Michael Caine starring in it. Mr Bones plays Robert Lees Queen Victoria's Medium. He reminds me of character Sebastian (David Walliams) in Little Britain. Heheeheeeee awwww bless him. xxxx