The Meaning of Recognition (33 page)

With all that said, however, there is undoubtedly a case for being told in advance that the magnificent detachment of E. E. Cummings from the workaday business world was made possible by a trust
fund, and that the apparent anti-Semitism of one of his poems was indeed the expression of a prejudice, although he was nothing like as bigoted as his wife. If I had known those things before I
wrote my first article about him, I would have been slower to praise him as an example of the unfettered intelligence. I found them out from a poorly written but awkwardly accurate biography. But I
read it only because I had always loved the best of his poetry, and I still do. I really don’t think there is all that much of substance in Foster’s two volumes about Yeats that is not
already there in Jeffares’ single volume, but undoubtedly the Foster behemoth is more up to date, and deserves to become the standard work. Heaven help us all, however, if a generation of
students should feel compelled to wade through it before they have submitted themselves to the full impact of the poetry to which Yeats gave his life, and in which, and nowhere else, he is truly
alive.

His nose preceding him by a quarter of an hour, the hero of
Cyrano de Bergerac
is a reminder that there were once things plastic surgery couldn’t do. Today it
can turn Michael Jackson into his own sister. But the original Cyrano, furiously active as poet, swordsman and celestial fantasist in seventeenth-century France, was stuck with his deformity. If he
had been born in the late 1890s, when the play that bears his name was written, he still would have been stuck with it. The playwright, Edmond Rostand, could count on that fact, and use it to bring
the sophisticated theatre-goers of Paris to their feet after reducing them to helpless weeping. Appearance was destiny. If a man’s appearance ruled him out in the eyes of the woman he loved,
there was nothing he could do about it. Except, perhaps, one thing. What if he could rule himself back in through her ears?

Armed with a tragically inflexible law and a comically rich possibility for how it might be broken, Rostand was inspired to a poetic narrative that conquered the world. The eloquent but very
ugly man, Cyrano, loves the beautiful young woman, Roxane. She favours the beautiful young man, Christian. He lacks the words to thrill her. The heartbroken Cyrano, wanting her to be happy, lends
him some. Thus supplied, Christian wins her hand, but he is killed in battle. In the end, with the mortally wounded Cyrano dying in her arms among the fallen autumn leaves of the convent courtyard,
Roxane finally realizes that it was his words, and therefore him, that she had loved all along. Alas, it is too late. And yet hooray, for true love has won through.
Sacre bleu, quelle
histoire!

There are reasons, which we will get to, for thinking that this seemingly unbreakable dramatic arc works best in the original French, but it would still provide a good night out in Esperanto,
and at the great classical theatre on the Ginza a kabuki version would not be inconceivable. In his own country alone, there were more than a thousand performances of the play while Rostand was
still alive. Many of the productions he supervised personally. Their accumulated box office receipts ensured that he would die rich. His magnificent house at the foot of the Pyrenees is still there
to inform visiting writers that if they envy the domestic arrangements of Pinter, Frayn and Stoppard then they haven’t seen anything yet. Rostand’s chuckling ghost lives well. There may
be plastic surgeons in California who live better, but not even they have yet managed to take the sweet sting out of an immortal story.

A brilliantly successful bullion raid from the start, the plot-line of
Cyrano de Bergerac
will probably never cease to make money until every male baby born on Earth is a clone of
Orlando Bloom. Men who can’t wow a woman with the fearful symmetry of their faces will always have to talk for victory. Cyrano will go on showing them how, in a coruscating tragicomical
pastiche that almost no amount of miscalculation can make dull. It must be said, however, that the new production at the National Theatre might have been designed to prove otherwise. A critic, in
my view, should always report the reaction of the audience before he delivers his own opinion. Well, the first-night audience clapped dutifully at the end, and there were cheers for Cyrano himself,
as incarnated by the film star Stephen Rea. But the Germans have a phrase that fits:
der Beifall war endenwollend
. The applause wanted to be over.

Things never looked promising to begin with. In the Olivier Theatre there is no curtain to go up, so the audience, as it came in, was already faced with the huge and deadly suggestion that the
sets would consist mainly of scaffolding. This turned out to be true, although the space-station centrifugal stage machinery was occasionally put into operation so that the scaffolding could be
seen from a different angle. On its first appearance, the vast metallic structure was dotted with supernumeraries whose weary attitudes suggested that they might have expired from boredom while
bolting it together. Ever since the first post-war translations of Brecht spread their pervasive influence, student productions of any play at all have characteristically established their
dedication to the alienation effect with precisely those two elements: scaffolding, and an opening tableau of underemployed walk-ons. This was going to be a student production. The premonition did
not necessarily spell disaster: last month in Wellington I saw a student production – admittedly buttressed by the participation of a few semi-pro actors – which cleverly adapted
Gogol’s
The Government Inspector
to local New Zealand small-town politics. Seated on each side of a tin shed, the audience had a wonderful time. Gogol had a big nose: so big that he
made it the disembodied hero of its own story. These were desperate things to be thinking of in the million-dollar arena of the Olivier while waiting for the main actors to join the scaffolding,
but without trust there is no life.

The trust paid off, but only in small change. The big notes had already been thrown on the fire long before a misconceived production reached its opening night. The scaffolding had already told
us that we would not be seeing seventeenth-century Paris. The attire of the actors soon told us that we would not be seeing many seventeenth-century costumes either. There were a few of them dotted
about, but only because they had been preserved in the same skip as all the other clobber, which dated variously from any time up to the day before yesterday. Rostand gives some warrant for this,
because he himself, writing more than two centuries after his reported events, didn’t care very much about strict adherence to temporality. But he cared like mad about theatricality. He
wanted the full romantic tackle, and he wanted it to swash until it buckled. Cloak, plumed hat and proper sword: he specified them all for his dynamic hero. It was thus three times a bad sign when
Cyrano made his entrance minus any of them. The plume sprouting from Cyrano’s hat is meant to be the mark of his panache. In French it is actually called a
panache
, and provides the
once inexhaustibly prolix Cyrano with his dying word, the last word of the play. The plume on Stephen Rea’s hat was a mere shy puff instead of a proudly flying banner. The sword was a
sword-stick: a different thing, and not appropriate for holding Cyrano’s cloak extended at the back, as one of his friends describes.

But he had no cloak. Instead, he had an overcoat, of a type worn by students all over the world to indicate that they are in rebellion against bourgeois values. No sooner had I seen this
overcoat than I was thinking once again of Gogol, who wrote a play called
The Overcoat
, and had a big nose. I would have been thinking of catching the next plane back to New Zealand if
Cyrano, along with everything else he had been deprived of, had been deprived of a big nose. Mercifully he had one, and the quality of its putty looked sufficiently durable to last the night.
Perhaps it had been provided by the same construction firm that won the contract for the scaffolding, which clearly would last forever.

Except for the nose, Mr Rea had been comprehensively sabotaged before he left the dressing room, but he generously agreed to remain on stage even when the choreography was taking place. The
choreography – the supposed necessity for which would have been news to Rostand – was fit to drive the audience out of the theatre and into the Thames, but it wasn’t going to do
that to Mr Rea, who staunchly defied several kinds of doom simultaneously, like a boy on a burning deck with his finger in a dyke. His close-ups on screen prove him to possess a winning charm of
facial expression, and his voice on the soundtrack is blessed with a melodious Irish burr fit to render any Roxane breathless. On stage, to which he is no stranger, both these attributes were still
in evidence, but the large nose necessarily worked against the first, and the larger distances it had to cross unnecessarily worked against the second. The Olivier only
looks
as if it
could swallow the sound of a Boeing 747 revving at full throttle against the brakes. In actuality, a quite small mortar bomb could go off on stage and most of the audience would still notice. Even
in those cavernous expanses, an actor’s voice can ring if it has power. Mr Rea’s voice hadn’t. Unfortunately Cyrano is lost if he can’t shout the place down. It is not
enough for him to be audible. He must be able to dominate the stage and everyone on it with a single bark of anger, and send a sigh of regret winging to the gallery. For Cyrano, vocal confidence is
a handy attribute even in the movies. Steve Martin, playing Cyrano as a small-town fireman in the excellent
Roxanne
, talks with a fluency that makes his mouth, and not his nose, the centre
of all eyes. In Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s movie of 1990, Gerard Depardieu commands silence from everyone else each time he speaks. Most memorably of all, in the Stanley Kramer movie of 1950,
José Ferrer raged with the effortless verbal authority that makes Cyrano’s tenderness mean so much when he succumbs to it.

For a stage Cyrano, verbal authority is not just a nice plus, it’s the whole game. For all I know, Stephen Rea in real life has the verbal authority to hail a taxi in a whisper. But as
Cyrano he showed little confidence in what he had to say. He should be excused for that, because what he had to say was a brand-new English translation that achieved the difficult feat of making
Cyrano no more thrilling as a speaker than a police commissioner at a press conference. Derek Mahon, who claims responsibility, is an accomplished poet in normal circumstances. His poem about
mushrooms in a garden shed is a justly celebrated anthology piece. He is even an accomplished poet when translating from the French: his version of Valery’s
Le cimetière marin
miraculously conveys almost all the pastel nuances of the original. But Rostand, although he has pastel nuances of his own, employs them only as grace-notes to his vaulting exuberance of invention,
which depends for much of its effect on being compressed and energized within strictly rhyming couplets. Disastrously, Derek Mahon was persuaded to keep the couplets but throw away the compression,
by making the rhymes so approximate that they were usually undetectable, and piffling when they were not.

I prefer not to believe that the persuasion was done by himself. The fee should pay his bills while he hides out in a foreign country until all this blows over, but when he gets back he will
probably be too polite to point the finger. Those less bashful will be inclined to detect the same genius for miscalculation that placed the order for a thousand tons of scaffolding. Here again,
the director, Howard Davies, might not have been solely responsible. There is a school of thought, to which I subscribe, which holds that some kind of interstellar virus has taken over the separate
brains of prominent theatrical people and united them into a single autistic personality dedicated to the unremitting gestation of bad ideas. The virus was already active when Tyrone Guthrie
invented the thrust stage, the awful precursor of theatre in the round. In his memoirs, Sir Alec Guinness said all that needed to be said about the thrust stage: in the absence of a proscenium, the
actor could never make a clean entrance or exit, and most of his moves would be dictated by the requirement of giving every sector of the audience a fair share of looking at his back. But Guinness
was only an actor, and the directors were already in control, with every dullard dreaming that he was the new Meyerhold or Piscator. The virus struck again with an even more debilitating notion,
the raked stage, down which no broken king can stumble without the audience fearing that he will join them in the stalls. The virus decreed that a raked stage could be dispensed with only on the
understanding that a flat floor would provide the base for a sufficiency of scaffolding, which would be mandatory if the text made reference to trees and balconies.

In the last scene of this triumphantly viral production, the dying Cyrano asked that his chair be placed against ‘this tree’. This tree was a tower of metal tubes. But by then we
were used to the anomaly. Towers of metal tubes had been pretending to be trees all night. The tops of the towers had been pretending to be balconies. High on her tubular balcony, Roxane, persuaded
by Cyrano’s ventriloqual ardour, gave Christian her permission to climb the jasmine tree. The climb up the jasmine tree took him long enough for me to concoct a brace of appropriate couplets
to which he is welcome, if the production can do a deal with my agent.

As played by Claire Price, Roxane was worth climbing the Chrysler Building to reach. If she looked a bit less like Kate Winslet, Miss Price would probably be a film star by now. As things are,
she is well on the way to being a first-choice theatrical leading lady for any company still harbouring the politically unreconstructed belief that a female object of love should actually be
beautiful. Her performance in the National’s
The Relapse
established her as a house favourite, and during her excursion to Sheffield it was noticed that Kenneth Branagh’s
Richard III – another and more swinish swain with a deformity problem – had believable reasons for throwing himself upon Lady Anne. She managed to look equally fetching in
Cyrano de
Bergerac
, even if the Olivier’s lack of footlights – another viral breakthrough – ensured that the full glory of her face was only intermittently visible. But she had very
little that was fetching to say. When Christian made the mistake of trying to woo her in his own words instead of Cyrano’s, she reproved him thus.