Theatrical production.
Director Yegor Peregudov: «Cyrano de Bergerac» is a play in verse about the poet and poetry, about the poetic perception of the world. The epitaph that Cyrano composed for himself contains the following words:
«He was a poet, but he did not create poems!..
But he lived his life like a poet!"
This is a fundamentally important topic for us — a discussion about the poetic perception of reality in today’s cynical world. A world filled with the fear of an epidemic, with the constant manifestation of injustice or aggression.
The play has a huge number of characters, but we’ve only retained seven. However, we did add some: we have musicians and poets, and even Cyrano’s inner world — his thoughts and fantasies. The production features young actors; at the time of the premiere, they were students at the Moscow Art Theatre School, and we all worked together to write poetry and compose music, and the production grew out of zongas — naive, fierce, and very talented. The young actors bring energy to the production: on the one hand, their own understanding of the world, and on the other, a protest against that world. In terms of the way of expressing themselves, it’s tempting to draw parallels with Lyubimov’s Theatre on… In Taganka, when he was young, he was uncompromising and very clear.
«Cyrano de Bergerac» is a play in which people solve their problems with the help of a sword, which is why we have fencing on stage. But it’s important to understand that Rostand wrote his «Cyrano» two hundred years after the life of his real‑life prototype; it’s a 17th‑century world, invented at the end of the 19th century, a romantically refracted reality. And this gives us the right, using the rules of the game established by the playwright, to also create our own world, to reinvent it anew. We take historical fencing and reflect on what fencing is today, in the 21st century. What kind of communication is this — exchanging jabs? For example, comments on social media posts — what is this if not a verbal jab? How does it work now? In Cyrano’s world, there is a code of honor; there are rules that you cannot break, even in a duel with an opponent. Now we fundamentally have no rules. Although I think that even in Rostand’s time, they weren’t really there anymore, and that’s exactly what he longed for.
