Theatre Ron Cerabona
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Cyrano de Bergerac. By Edmond Rostand. Adapted and directed by Damien Ryan. Sport for Jove Theatre. The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, June 28-July 1. canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 62752700.
If you see a man with an unusually protuberant proboscis wandering around Civic sometime soon, try not to stare too hard. It's probably director Damien Ryan, trying out the latex appliance he wears playing the title character in his adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. for Sport for Jove Theatre. The nose is more than seven centimetres long
"I've got to get used to it," he says.
He had worn it to a cafe in Sydney during the season there, going by himself, and says it was an "extraordinary" experience.
"People did a double take, a triple take, they couldn't look away."
It was, he says, a wonderful lesson as an actor - he found out something of what it would be like to have such a prominent physical feature and how it would be regarded by society - the curiosity, the incessant glances and gazes.
"I felt so self-conscious."
He was able to channel these feelings into the character of Cyrano. Rostand's 1897 play was inspired by the life of the real Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), a novelist, playwright and soldier, albeit heavily fictionalised.
Cyrano is a witty, multi-talented man - a poet, writer and soldier, as skilled with a quill as a sword. But his outward confidence and swagger masks a deep insecurity and pain about his long nose. He is secretly in love with his childhood friend Roxanne but fears her rejection for his outward ugliness. Roxanne has no romantic interest in Cyrano but has eyes for his handsome soldier friend Christian. But he isn't terribly bright, lacking Cyrano's flair for exquisite language, and turns to his comrade for help in wooing Roxanne. So it is that Cyrano finds himself composing beautiful words to the woman he loves expressing the feelings he has for her - on behalf of somebody else.
Ryan says it was Rostand's brilliant notion that it takes two men to combine and form the perfect Renaissance man although there are more layers to Cyrano de Bergerac than this. All three main characters are flawed - by self-doubt, by ego, by vanity, by foolishness - and the play explores themes such as love and sacrifice and friendship and beauty and courage and panache that remain timeless.
There are Shakespearean parallels, Ryan points out, including to Romeo and Juliet, although in this play's balcony scene there are two "Romeos" under the balcony of the unsuspecting "Juliet", one feeding lines to the other.
More than two decades are covered by Cyrano de Bergerac - which Ryan has updated from the mid-17th century to the period spanning just before World War I to the 1930s. Ryan says he did this partly because the less familiar original period setting doesn't give modern audiences much of a sense of change whereas the era from the end of the Belle Epoque and the outbreak of World War I through to the 1930s was a more recognisable time of upheaval and alteration both visually and historically.
Also, he says, the 1640s setting can unintentionally impose "a slightly pantomimic feel" in its costumes and he wanted his Cyrano to have more of a Willfrid Owen soldier-poet feeling. And there's a particularly apt tie-in to the period.
"Cyrano de Bergerac was used very powerfully during World War I to keep the French people's spirits up - it was performed 750 times," he says.
In adapting the text, Ryan worked with a literal translation of the French original as well as consulting other English versions and changed the 12-syllable original Alexandrine rhyming couplets into the more familar (to Anglophone audiences) iambic pentamenter ("about 50 per cent"). blank verse ("45 per cent") and prose. He also cut about half an hour from the original three-and-a half-hour running time.
While adapting, directing and acting in the three-hour play might seem like a lot of work, Ryan says he didn't intend to undertake all three originally. It was only when Yalia Ozucelik, who played Cyrano in Sport for Jove's original 2013 production, was unable to return for this remounting that he - an actor as well as a writer and director - decided to step into the role. He already knew the play intimately, another major role also had to be recast, though all the other original actors returned, and there was only a two-week rehearsal period available rather than the usual five weeks before the play had to begin its Sydney season.
"It's particularly challenging, one of the longest roles imaginable to learn in this tight period so I went with it."
Rostand's play has been adapted many times in the theatre, as a play, an opera and a musical. It's also been adapted into other media with notable film versions including the 1950 film starring Jose Ferrer who won the best actor Oscar and the 1990 film starring Gerard Depardieu who won the best actor award at Cannes. That production won 10 Cesar Awards including best film. Roxanne (1987) written by and starring Steve Martin was a contemporary, comedic reworking of the story. All these mountings, translations and reworkings over the course of more than a century are testament to the lasting power of Rostand's story and the strength and poignancy of his characters.