Fight Clip Club: Cyrano

Our FCC series begins with a classic rapier fight.

I own a total of seven (7) copies of Cyrano de Bergerac, not counting my own piecemeal translation begun in grad school. These include the original French script and 6 different translations, though I no longer own the Burgess one, my favorite—I gave it as a gift to my father-in-law one Xmas and so I’m okay with that. Cyrano is a monumental and a seminal work in my life, and remains one of my favorite plays. I love how operatically melodramatic* it is, and the unhinged late-1800s romance but in musketeer costumes, the premise of the ugly-outside, beautiful-poet-inside theme (gee I wonder why this resonated with me as a geeky teen)…

*I saw that they converted it into a musical recently, with the esteemed Peter Dinklage in the title role, and I feel like if any play lends itself to the musical treatment well, it’s got to be Cyrano. I haven’t heard any scuttlebutt about this, though—it must’ve disappointed, I guess, since I only heard hype leading up to its opening and then nada?

I first encountered this play my senior year in high school, when I was in AP (Advanced Placement) French class—you know, that advanced course you take at good high schools where it’s basically like taking a college course and then you take a test at the end to determine the college credit hours you earned? Yep. So back in my day, high school was 3 years, and so I took French 1 my first year, as was the norm. Since I had not only taken French in junior high but was also a language learning sponge and natural mimic, I found French 1 to be way too easy. The strict Parisian who taught French there decided to skip me up to French 3 the following year, which, though much more enjoyable (we read Le Petit Prince among other full works of art), was still pretty much a breeze. That summer, I spent a month abroad in Southern France staying with a French family, so by the time I got back I was way ahead of even those I’d skipped ahead of, and so was skipped yet one more time into French 5, or AP French. 

In AP French, we never spoke English in class, and read all kinds of classical literature: Rabelais, Voltaire, a quick and super fun foray into the Arsène Lupin universe, and the last classic we read in that class was Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Just as we were on this unit in class, too, the grand epic movie starring Gerard Depardieu came out in theatres. All the perfect sumptuous costumes and soaring score that I immediately, after our class field trip to a subtitle-free screening, bought on cassette and wore out, ignited my teenage soul. I was already a Shakespeare nut, and the Musketeers are only a little later, time-period-wise, with similar costumes and all the cool swashbuckling, plus French panache. 

So this particular film version of Cyrano has a special place in my heart, and I only came to love it more the more of an expert I became in stage combat. Plus, the rapier is pretty much my favorite weapon, if I had to choose one.