a weaponless marvel of language.” – The Observer ★★★★★ “A beloved tale of yearning, beauty, and desire. ★★★★★ “The most breathtakingly exciting show in London right now.” – Evening Standard ★★★★★ “Funny, thrilling and deeply moving.” – WhatsOnStage ★★★★★ “I defy anyone not to fall in love with it.” – The Telegraph Sentimental monument to love.” – The Washington Post The production highlights a cool new vocabulary for Edmond Rostand’s
With a whip-smart script by Martin Crimp, I spent most of the production’s swift two acts fully engaged in its humor, pathos and fury.” – The New York Times It’s also a world in which, as the baker Ragueneau (now a poet, too) predicts, ‘There’s going to be a new force of words’. Replacing Rostand’s stately 12-syllable alexandrines with jumpier rhythms, its euphemisms with plain speech and its perfect rhymes with ones so slant they serve as italics, Crimp rockets the action to a world drunk on language as it’s actually spoken. The dew bottles got Cyrano only as far as Canada, where he had to resort to his firecracker firepower to carry him the rest of the way.★★★★★ “Mesmerising. The frontispiece ( first image) is supposed to depict Cyrano's first attempt at lunar flight, using bottles of dew strapped to his body, the evaporation of which would carry him upward, although it is not a very convincing depiction. In 1687, there was another English translation, and this one comes on the market every now and then, although we have never been able to afford it. The work was translated into English in 1659, and that edition is just as rare. Once he arrives on the moon, the unnamed narrator (whom we assume to be Cyrano) finds that the ruling race is quadrupedal and the menials are bipeds, and the Moon creatures refuse to believe that the Earth is inhabited, because it is just a moon of the Moon, and moons are never inhabited.Ĭyrano's pioneering work of science fiction is very scarce we have never seen a first edition. The 17th century saw a number of such imaginary voyages to the Moon, by the likes of Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin, but Cyrano's trip is notable because of his motive power - his craft was propelled by firecrackers! This was not exactly rocket science, but it was close (Godwin had flown to the moon in a rig powered by 25 geese!). First page of “Histoire comique des Etat et Empire de la Lune,” Oeuvres, 1703 (Linda Hall Library)
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