Cyrano de Bergerac

By Edmond Rostand and John Murrell

classic, Cyrano de Bergerac, is an epic and heroic tale that has fascinated and enchanted generations. Not since 1938 has there been a more readable or stageable prose translation of this classic favourite. With a rich tapestry of gallant soldiers, starving poets, musketeers, marquises and bluestockings, Cyrano de Bergerac moves along with a fast-paced plot and a cast of delightful major and minor characters. At its heart is the chivalrous and intelligent Cyrano, masterful soldier, accomplished poet, ferocious orator, chivalrous lover … and the possessor of an extraordinary nasal appendage!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780889228344

Edmond Rostand

Born in 1869, Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand’s romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand’s works, Les Romanesques, was adapted to the musical comedy, The Fantasticks.

Book preview

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

By Edmond Rostand

A New Prose Translation by John Murrell

Talon_logo_07_4ebooks

Table of Contents

Cover

First Production Notes

Translator’s Note

Staging Notes

Act One: A Spectacle in the Hôtel de Bourgogne

Act Two: The Bakery of Poets

Act Three: A Kiss from Roxane

Act Four: Young Men of Gascony at War

Act Five: Cyrano’s Weekly Report

About the Translator

Copyright Information

This translation/adaptation is for Brent and for Robin.

Cyrano de Bergerac was first performed December 28, 1897, in Paris at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin.

Cyrano de Bergerac: A New Prose Translation was first performed January 30, 1994, in Edmonton, Alberta, at the Citadel Theatre, under the direction of Robin Phillips, with Brent Carver as Cyrano, Kate Newby as Roxane, Andrew Jackson as Christian, William Webster as Ragueneau, Ian Robison as de Guiche, Jeffrey Renn as Le Bret, and Hazel Desbarats as Roxane’s Chaperone and as Mother Marguerite.

Also appearing, in a variety of roles each, were Timothy E. Brummund, Colin Campbell, Sean Finnan, Tracey Flye, Glen Gaston, Anna Hagan, Brad Hampton, Kirk Heuser, Terence Kelly, Paul Mulloy, Roman Pfob, Roger Schultz, Roger Shank, and Michael Spencer-Davis.

Set and Properties were designed by Hisham Ali, Costumes by Ann Curtis, Lighting by Louise Guinand. Music was composed by Laura Burton, Fights directed by Jean-Pierre Fournier, and Movement and Dances were coached by John Broome. The Stage Manager was Vincent Berns.

Translator’s Note

After all these years of playwriting, translating/adapting, directing, acting, watching, and listening, I am convinced that every foreign language play deserves and needs at least two outstanding translations into English: one that is scholarly, and as literal as possible without abandoning good sense; and another that is playable by contemporary actors for a contemporary audience, with all jokes and sentiments and crises of the right kinds in the right places, but with free play granted to the translator/adaptors’s dramatic imagination and linguistic personality – always within the bounds of the original author’s concept, but not timidly or worshipfully a slave to it.

This latter kind of translation/adaptation is meant to be heard and seen and felt in a theatre space, and must, I think, be the work of a theatre writer, a playwright with a good working knowledge of the original language, the original author and the world of the play, but also with ample originality and audacity of his or her own. What should be avoided in this sort of translation/adaptation for the theatre is any sense of the translator as tourist, wandering awestruck and intimidated through the antique splendour of the text. A playwright/ translator/adaptor must be bolder than that. This job is really more like high-level espionage. You must so thoroughly infiltrate and acclimatize to the play you are translating that you sound like a native of that foreign place. Even when you cross back over into your own language and time, you bring with you a look and a smell and a taste that seem complete and authentic to that other world, but also perfectly, instantly understandable to the rest of us.

The freest, most audacious of the fifteen or so translations I have seen of my own play Memoir is George Wilson’s miraculous Sarah et le cri de la langouste. It ran for several years in Paris and continues to be played throughout the French-speaking world. Wilson trimmed my play ruthlessly, he moved individual lines and whole segments of dialogue from one act to the other, he added numerous quips and quotes from his vast knowledge and experience of French classical theatre, and he invented (from a mere whiff in my original) the whole story of Oscar Wilde’s reflection on the terrified or ecstatic cries of the moribund crayfish, which I have since translated back into English and incorporated in all versions of the text.

I had serious doubts about M. Wilson’s elegant romp through my paean to Bernhardt, until I saw it, with a mostly very young, rapt audience, in the theatre in Paris. It worked. Where Wilson had stuck very close to my original, it worked and I was delighted. Where he had departed drastically from my sense and even from my structure, it also worked, and worked so splendidly within the true spirit of what I wanted the piece to be for its audience, that I was stunned and even more delighted – I had learned something: spirit, atmosphere, mood, wit, taste, context, are even more mysteriously essential to successful theatre than they are to other forms of literature; and you cannot have spirit, atmosphere, mood, wit, taste, and context without the impact of a genuine personality and a unique viewpoint, both from the original author and from the translator/adaptor of the drama.

A solid case could be presented, I believe, for poets as the best translators of poetry, novelists as the best translators of novels, etc. But that is outside the scope of these remarks.

Some readers may feel I have invaded Cyrano’s and Rostand’s world a bit roughly in this translation/adaptation. I don’t think brave actors or directors will feel this way. I have written verse, strictly in the format and often in the metre of the French original, where verse is dramatically logical for us – in English, at the end of the twentieth century. Obviously I have not tried to imitate Rostand’s heroic couplets throughout. English, for all its grab-bag vitality and rhythmical complexity, is relatively poor in good rhymes. And I’m not sure how many of Rostand’s rhymes are all that good, even in French, even in their own time. I love him for walking the tight-rope between inventiveness and preciousness, creating rhymes out of archaic verb-forms, silly and justly forgotten historical references, odd plant and animal names, the cobwebs of pedantry. But to attempt this in modern English, for an audience to comprehend and appreciate instantly upon hearing it, is to risk the confusion and tedium that most verse translations of this play evoke in modern audiences, however dazzling the physical production.

It is not Rostand’s gifts as a poet that have made this play live. Far from it. Those modest, old-fashioned gifts, in fact, have made his less dramatic, more consistently poetical other plays (la samaritaine, Chantecler) unplayable today, even in France.

What is the magic of Cyrano de Bergerac then? Certainly, it is in Cyrano’s own character, his soul, his panache (which Rostand undoubtedly possessed himself, but which, unlike his protagonist, he buried or disguised in a comfortably ordinary life). So much has been written about Cyrano’s human grandeur and wit and love that I will not attempt to add much – beyond a personal reflection on one of his less publicized traits: his passionate misanthropy. While it is true that he worships Roxane beyond the bounds of logic or discretion, and comes to love even Christian, to respect even de Guiche, in a dispassionate melancholic sort of way, the truth is that Cyrano feels different, set apart, isolated, a freak as he calls himself in this version – and he relishes this feeling. Not once – not even at his most personal, in Act One with Le Bret – does he say that he wishes to be normal, to be like other people. He would like to be allowed certain simple pleasures that other, less fantastical creatures enjoy – but while remaining entirely as freakish as he is.

Cyrano loves the distance between himself and the normal world, normal people. Does he manufacture this defiantly weird attitude merely as a defence against ridicule? I don’t feel that. Perhaps, when he was very young, when his freakish features and much more freakish behaviour were first mocked or pitied. But, in his extravagant prime, in this play, he is openly, lyrically hostile to normality. His adoration of Roxane surely stems, at least in part, from the fact that she is almost as exotic, as extra-terrestrial as he is. Her attitudes are not simply those of a précieuse, an aesthetic feminist of her time. She takes those artificial attitudes and transforms them into a world, a way of life, which she genuinely believes is bigger, more important, better than the way most people live – and Cyrano loves her for this – for how much of himself there is in her.

I think this hatred for what is normal and stable, and of the dreariness that usually accompanies the normal and stable, is the fire that has kept interest in this play so warm during the nearly one hundred years since it saw the light. In today’s world which, even more than Rostand’s or Cyrano’s, wants to exorcize human individuality – a world that is not just intolerant, but downright terrified, of anything unusually vibrant – it is no wonder that we need to wave the banner of this play so frequently. Like certain great late plays of Shakespeare, like the music of Berlioz, like every Van Gogh painting, this vision of Cyrano will not sit down and be quiet with the others. He stands up, angular and rigid even in death, he is loud, and he iscompletely uninterested in conforming. He despises those who do conform. I love the fury in his refusal.

No remarks about this play are complete without reference, not just to Cyrano himself, but to the sumptuous banquet of other characters Rostand has created. Ragueneau with his intense sweet tooth for verse, the raging but always rational Le Bret, Roxane’s diligently intrusive Chaperone, Carbon de Castel-Jaloux whose final line rings with heroic pain, the divinely pragmatic Mother Marguerite – all of these, their distinct places and times of life – in perfect concert with the more shaded figures of Roxane, Christian, de Guiche, and Cyrano himself – present us with a world so lavish that it may at first seem indigestible.

I have tried, in this freely translated/adapted performance version of Rostand’s heroic comedy – and through suggested stage-wise abridgement of the full text – to make Cyrano and his world compelling, challenging, but totally accessible in the theatre – which is, after all, the extraordinary place of prominence that he demands.

John Murrell

Calgary, Summer 1994

NOTE: What follows is a complete translation of Rostand’s play. Those sections enclosed within square brackets may be omitted during a staged performance, in the interests of brevity or clarity. – J.M.

Characters in the Play

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

ROXANE (Magdeleine or Madeleine Robin), his beloved

CHRISTIAN DE NEUVILLETTE, her beloved

THE COMTE DE GUICHE (later DUC DE GRAMONT), also in love with Roxane

RAGUENEAU, baker by trade, Cyrano’s friend

LE BRET, soldier by trade, Cyrano’s friend

ROXANE’S CHAPERONE

LIGNIÈRE, a drunken poet, Christian’s friend

THE VICOMTE DE VALVERT, suitor to Roxane, de Guiche’s friend

CUIGY, a very minor noble and busybody, an admirer of Cyrano

BRISSAILLE, the same

MONTFLEURY, a famous tragedian

BELLEROSE, manager of the acting troupe [known as FIRST ACTOR in the abridged text]

JODELET, a famous comedian [known as SECOND ACTOR in the abridged text]

Other ACTORS AND ACTRESSES, including a SOUBRETTE named Georgette

The PORTER of the theatre in the Hôtel de Bourgogne

The BUFFET ATTENDANT, a young woman

The LAMPLIGHTER

STAGEHANDS

The CONCERT MASTER of the Theatre Orchestra [optional in the abridged text]

Other MUSICIANS, including TWO VIOLINISTS [optional in the abridged text]

Several THEATRE PAGES [optional in the abridged text]

Several MINOR MARQUIS, resident Parisian gossips and hangers-on

A CUTPURSE

TRAINEES, of the cutpurse [not in the abridged text]

A MIDDLE-CLASS CITIZEN

HIS SON

An IRRITABLE TYPE, an admirer of Montfleury

A MUSKETEER, d’Artagnan, exactly as Dumas père describes him [not in the abridged text]

CAVALIERS

A GUARDSMAN, in pursuit of A FLOWER SELLER

Various CITIZENS, ARISTOCRATS, ACADEMICIANS, ARTLOVERS, MILITARY MEN, OTHER THEATRE-GOERS, including

CARDINAL RICHELIEU, seen only as an eminent gray shadow [not in the abridged text]

LISE, Ragueneau’s wife

Several PASTRY CHEFS, Ragueneau’s employees

Several SOUS-CHEFS and APPRENTICES

TWO YOUNGSTERS, bakery customers

A MUSKETEER, not d’Artagnan, LISE’s paramour

A band of STARVING POETS, Ragueneau’s coterie

CARBON DE CASTEL-JALOUX, Captain of Cyrano’s regiment of the Royal Guard

Numerous SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS OF THE ROYAL GUARD

A MIDDLE-CLASS CITIZEN, who approaches Cyrano in the bakery, not the same as in Act One [not in the abridged text]

A JOURNALIST, Théophraste Renaudot [not in the abridged text]

DE GUICHE’S FOOTMAN

A swarm of CITIZENS, ARISTOCRATS, MILITARY MEN,STREET PEOPLE, etc., who invade Ragueneau’s shop

A flock of exquisitely refined POETS AND POETESSES, Madame Clomire’s visitors (some of whom also appear in the audience, in Act One)

TWO ITINERANT MUSICIANS, temporarily belonging to Cyrano

A CAPUCHIN MONK, on an errand from de Guiche

ROXANE’S FOOTMEN [optional]

A DRUMMER BOY, maybe more than one [optional]

BERTRANDOU, an older member of the Royal Guard, their fifer

A SPANISH COMMANDER [not in the abridged text]

SPANISH SOLDIERS, OFFICERS, MUSKETEERS, STANDARDBEARERS [voices only in the abridged text]

MOTHER MARGUERITE, Superior of a convent of the Order Of The Holy Cross

SISTER MARTHE, a nun in this convent

SISTER CLAIRE, likewise

Other NUNS, in the same convent

Act One

A Spectacle in the Hôtel de Bourgogne

1640. The great hall of the hôtel, an indoor tennis court redecorated as a theatre.

The stage is a large makeshift platform with the customary benches, left and right, for those petty nobles who wish to sit onstage. The main curtain is a heavy tapestry,