Cyrano opened on 14 August 1982 (after four previews) to huge acclaim. Derek Goldby’s directing was praised as both sensitive and dashing – at the end of the first act he had the whole cast charge out through the auditorium to the sounds of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival overture – while Cameron Porteous’s costume designs flamboyantly and colourfully depicted the fops, courtesans, pickpockets, and soldiers of seventeenth-century Paris on five different sets (superbly lit by Robert Thomson). Heath Lamberts was feted both by audiences and critics. It was a virtuoso performance, in which Lamberts – an actor of unheroic physical stature – made a hero of Cyrano by stoic acceptance of his misfortunes. And he made Rostand’s poetry sing. “He can take the words,” said Audrey Ashley in the Ottawa Citizen, “toss them in the air, give them life and colour and beauty, and so dazzle us with them that we forget his unromantic bearing.” “The finest farceur in Canada, no, on the continent,” wrote Gina Mallet in the Toronto Star, “Lamberts has always been unparalleled at suggesting that even beneath the silliest ass, a great soul may be lurking.” In Lamberts’ Cyrano Mallet saw that soul, a soul that “captures greatness irretrievably, bringing absurdity and heroism together with panache, an imperishable swagger of the spirit.” This was, concluded Mallet, the best production at the Shaw Festival since Tony van Bridge’s 1977 Man and Superman.

Cyrano went on to further success and more accolades in the Festival’s 1983 season (“You may never again have as grand a collection of acting, directing, and design talent in as great a play of romance and comedy on this stage,” declared the Canadian Press), and, in the winter of 1984-85 at Toronto’s Royal Alexander Theatre. Regrettably, a planned television production in 1983 never materialized. But of more immediate importance to Christopher Newton in the fall of 1982 was that the success of Cyrano (with a 99% box office) had capped a season that had, to a large extent, satisfied both the expectations of the board and Newton’s own sense of objectives and priorities for the Festival.

 

Mise en scène : Derek Goldby

Première: le 14 août 1982

Costumes : Cameron Porteous

Scénographie : Robert Thomson

Adaptation : Anthony Burgess

Cyrano de Bergerac  – Heath Lamberts