By Liz Nicholls,
“All the fun stuff,” says Edmonton actor/playwright Jessy Ardern says of her initial attraction to Cyrano de Bergerac. “Sword fights, and romance, and war, and arrogant rich people getting their comeuppance….”
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Ah yes, and a famously nose-forward hero, a swordsman and wordsmith of spectacular virtuosity. “He’s the person we all wish we could be intellectually,” she says. “So clever, so fast. And there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing rich arrogant snobs, who keep thinking they can get the better of him, fail so fast, and so hard because he’s so dazzling.”
Ardern’s new verse adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 classic, commissioned by the Citadel in 2024, starts previews this weekend — a three-way co-production with Royal Manitoba Theatre Company (in Ardern’s original home town of Winnipeg) and the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., directed by SkirtsAfire artistic producer Amanda Goldberg and featuring a top-drawer creative team from across the country. There hasn’t been a Cyrano at the Citadel since 1994, and Robin Phillips’ production, starring Brent Carver and Kate Newby.
playwright Jessy Ardern. Photo supplied.
“What really attracted me, when I started working on it,” says Ardern, “was that the play is much more interesting than the pop culture understanding of it.” You think of Kevin Kline or Gérard Dépardieu in the role, as she says, and he’s a dashing, sexy figure, albeit overly endowed in the nasal department. From Rostand’s play (via multiple English translations from the French) emerges the sense of “a real, complicated, thorny, prickly, difficult person that you also love,” Ardern has discovered. “Because he’s brilliant and funny and has all these amazing qualities. But he’s tricky. And so angry!”
And that’s not the typical portrait of Cyrano in countless movies and stage versions (and the odd musical). For one thing, in the Rostand original, he’s actually a young guy. The same age as his beloved Roxanne, the clever young beauty to whom he writes love poetry channelled through the mouthpiece of handsome but tongued-tied Christian.
In the original, Cyrano and Roxanne are childhood friends; they grew up together. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense, as Ardern points out, when, as per typical casting, Cyrano is 20 or 30 years older than Roxanne. “In the bulk of the (original) play Cyrano is 21-years old! An angry young man. Which is something I’d not seen in depictions of him…. Like Hamlet, it’s one of those big career-defining roles get given to actors with clout, who’ve had long, illustrious careers and name recognition,” says Ardern, thinking of Dépardieu, Derek Jacobi, José Ferrer, or Steve Martin (Ardern’s first Cyrano, she says, was his movie Roxanne).
Ardern’s new adaptation resists this typical age differential, she says. “Having Scott (Scott Shpeley) is such a gift! He’s born for this role; he brings a lot of the fire to it that I think is central to the text.”
And what of the signature nose? There have been recent productions, like the Jamie Lloyd Cyrano starring James McAvoy, that dispense with it altogether. Or, it’s “just a little Muppet nose” stuck onto the comely facade of a handsome actor, “so that (a) it doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable and (b) downplays the fact that it’s harder moving through the world when you’re unattractive. We have a bias toward attractive people.”
“I just feel he should be an ugly man. With an ugly nose,” says Ardern, who’s interested in our discomfort with an unattractive hero. True, “as much as we’ve progressed from seeing ugliness as a sign of the devil — and it’s 2026 and we’re a lot more body positive than we used to be — we’re still much more comfortable making him look a little silly,” or “casting him so it’s about his size, his age, (even) his gender.”
“So we didn’t want to shy away from his unattractiveness,” says Ardern. “And (here’s) the other thing, how long can you see him like that when he just blows your mind every time he opens his mouth?” As she points out, the people who know him in Rostand’s play see “a dazzling man. But he isn’t able to look in the mirror and see that dazzling man; he just sees the freak.”
Ardern’s playwright archive, as Edmonton audiences know, reveals a specialty in original adaptations spun from classic texts (Queen Lear, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Prophecy, The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song). “I’ve worked a lot with myth … where there’s a sketch of plot, a sketch of character, but I can more or less invent.” Cyrano is the first time she’s adapted an existing play.
And it’s a hefty one. The original, says Ardern, clocks in at 5 1/2 hours, longer than Hamlet. But aside from taming its “absurd length,” she says of the Rostand, “I can’t improve on the plot,” complicated as it is. “The essentials are gold.”
Finding the right language, though, was an intriguing challenge, as Ardern describes. Rostand’s play was written in complicated French verse, 12-syllable Alexandrine couplets, at the end of the 19th century, and takes place in 1640. “A throwback to the great Romantic French tradition, but with many at-the-time contemporary references,” she says. “There’s a touch of Bridgerton about it … a period piece, yes, but never meant to be a museum piece.”
It’s tricky. For the last 120 years, says Ardern, every English version of Cyrano has had to decide between honouring the word-by-word text, or capturing the spirit and style of the piece in verse. Ardern took up the (extreme) challenge of a rhyming adaptation. “It’s always been a joyfully stylistic piece, and I felt that could get lost in prose. Especially since Cyrano is a poet, going off on beautiful fantastical poetic thoughts. Which is weird if everyone else in the play is just speaking regular English.”
“I wanted it to rhyme, but feel dynamic and unexpected,” so Ardern listened to a lot of hip-hop, “since hip- hop artists are very good at setting a rhythm and then breaking it….” Everyone in Cyrano’s world has “a fairly standard meter; people speak in couplets. And then Cyrano comes, and he’s much more dexterous and loose with the language, and blows that door open.” Roxanne (Stephanie Sy), “brilliant woman as she is,” is “one of the few people in Cyrano’s life who can actually keep up with him.”
Ardern, who’s quick and thoughtful, considers that “jazz might be a better analogy — there’s a rhythm and style, and you want to feel it has a logic.” And then she lands another analogy: “everyone else is singing Rogers and Hammerstein, and Cyrano is singing Sondheim.”
And Stephen Sondheim, “the great rhyme master” who wrote extensively on that subject and reputedly went through the world with a rhyming dictionary in his back pocket, was her other great inspiration, Ardern says. Rhyme is contagious, she points out, laughing. “When I was working on rhyming dialogue for hours every day I started to go a little bit mad! I started to see rhymes everywhere.” And as rehearsals started, so did the cast, she reports.
“It was always a question of honouring the brilliance and style of the original text, while making it as alive and dynamic as it was always meant to be,” says Ardern. “To be honest, I had to learn how to write this play. I had a goal; I knew what I wanted to achieve. But I had to teach myself how to write that.”
“I’d never written in rhyme before,” she says. “I’d never written anything like it before…. The first scene took me two months,” very long (“outrageous,” she says cheerfully) for a playwright who writes fast, then edits and re-writes.
“The cliché is that characters can only be as intelligent as their authors. One thing I’ve learned in this process is that is not true! It takes me three weeks to come up with something it takes Cyrano two seconds to come up with, off the top of his head.” Ah, and he can do that, taking word cues from the bystanders, while engaged in a sword fight.
“I asked myself ‘what word would Roxanne shout out?’ And she says an impossible word.” Ardern laughs. “A great idea! But then I had to come up with it.”
PREVIEW
Cyrano de Bergerac
Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Grand Theatre
Written by: Edmond Rostand
Adapted by: Jessy Ardern
Directed by: Amanda Goldberg
Starring: Scott Shpeley, Stephanie Sy, Lara Arabian, Alexander Ariate, Noah Beemer, Andrew Cecon, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Brian Hamman, Darren Martens, Megan McArton, Siobhan Richardson, Sydney Williams
Where: Citadel Shoctor Theatre
Running: May 2 (in preview) through May 24
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820
