Cyrano de Bergerac

It was in this spirit that the sociétaire of the Troupe Denis Podalydès took over the boards of the Salle Richelieu for the first time in 2006. “It is to the soul of Cyrano that I wanted to dedicate this poem. But since it has passed into you, Coquelin, it is to you that I dedicate it”, announced Edmond Rostand. The author’s most famous work came about from a collaboration with the actor Benoît Constant Coquelin, first to perform the role in 1897. The same complicity is at work more than a century later in the energy of the group led by Denis Podalydès, whose staging of Lucrèce Borgia is also on the programme this season. Comic opera, tragedy, romantic drama, farce... all genres combine to make the partition of this emblematic text of the French repertoire hum. Cyrano is not scaled down, none of its excesses are culled. To let the audience revel in its set pieces, the action is heated to boiling point in a large crucible drawing on the full potential of the Comédie-Française: “we wanted the production to come out of the belly of our theatre, out of the cellars, the attics, the flies and the spaces underneath: the whole machine.” This production won six Molière awards in 2007.