Is ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ a catfish story?
Was Cyrano de Bergerac the original catfish? That’s what acclaimed U.S. filmmaker Jordan Peele declared on Twitter nine years ago, to a chorus of retweets and likes.
While Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” play was written in 1897 — long before the internet — there are resonances with catfishing, say key creatives involved in a production now running at the Shaw Festival. Catfishing is the practice of assuming a false online identity to lure someone into a romantic relationship, and usually involves financial scamming or identity theft.
The Cyrano story is “definitely OG (original) catfishing,” said Jeff Irving, who plays Christian in the Shaw staging. His character is conventionally handsome and falls in love with the beautiful Roxane (Deborah Hay), though he’s never spoken to her. Lacking confidence, Christian convinces the eloquent Cyrano (Tom Rooney) to write Roxane love letters on his behalf.
Cyrano, meanwhile, also loves Roxane but is afraid to tell her because he is insecure about his unusually big nose.
And so, “Cyrano makes the choice to use the avatar of Christian to be the mouthpiece for his words,” said Irving. In contemporary language: Cyrano catfishes Roxane.
Chris Abraham, director of the Shaw production, agreed that the Cyrano story resonates in the digital age. “What the internet does for many people is to create this space where they get to invent themselves,” he said. Online, “for ill or for good, you can create a version of yourself that transcends your appearance,” said Abraham.
Kate Hennig, who translated and adapted Rostand’s play for the Shaw production, first encountered the Cyrano story when she saw the 1990 film starring Gérard Depardieu, and “wept for three days afterwards.” Cyrano “has this incredible heart and soul of love,” Hennig said. “He’s trapped inside a body that the eye cannot see past.”
Hennig finds the deepest resonances between the Cyrano story and catfishing in the play’s central balcony scene: It’s when Cyrano feeds Christian the words to woo Roxane and at one point speaks those words himself, all the time staying in the shadows.
“The darkness creates the opportunity for private and secret discussion,” Hennig said. “The internet does that. The internet can be all about secrecy.”
Another parallel between the play and catfishing is that words become the most powerful tool, much more than images. “The sex that’s achievable in letters, that’s what Roxane is interested in,” she said. “It’s something that is addicting and binding and passionate.”
But a crucial difference between catfishing and what happens in “Cyrano,” said Hennig, is that real live bodies are involved. “I think there’s a totally different level of chemical response when there is physical proximity, as opposed to the cloak of the internet,” she said.
Another thing that makes the play more complicated than contemporary catfishing is the love triangle: Cyrano deceives Roxane on Christian’s behalf, and she arguably falls in love with both of them: with Christian’s looks and Cyrano’s eloquence. But then again, Cyrano uses the situation to say things to Roxane that he otherwise lacks the capacity, or perhaps the courage, to express.
It’s this complexity that makes the play endure, said Abraham. “Cyrano embarks on his wooing of Roxane out of a heroic notion of selfsacrifice. He does it because he’s called to a high purpose for the woman that he loves,” Abraham said. “Within his wooing, however, there is also something self-serving.”
This Shaw staging is a revival of a production that premiered in 2019, with nearly all the actors reprising their roles. The title character is played by Tom Rooney, whom Abraham says is deeply suited to the part. “He just naturally moves into those spaces of deep relationship to action and responsibility.”
A prime motivation for Hennig in adapting the story was to “make something a little bit better for Roxane” than in the original. “I’ve tried to show her burgeoning intellect, as a woman in that time where deep intellectual pursuit was really limited” for women, said Hennig.
Roxane, said Abraham, faces “that terrible predicament of being a woman at a time in history where everything was fodder for scandal. She can’t be seen to be doing anything towards pursuing her love match,” he said. At the beginning of the play Roxane asks Cyrano to protect Christian, who’s just been recruited into Cyrano’s band of cadets and will likely be subject to hazing. In this way she exercises her agency safely and also launches the play’s intrigue.
At the core of this story — and doubtless behind many a catfishing scheme — is Cyrano’s insecurity in his appearance, and that’s something many people can relate to.
“I felt acutely as a teenager, the challenge of being beautiful or not being beautiful,” said Abraham. “I don’t think that there’s a human being that hasn’t felt that way, no matter how beautiful by some kind of standard they actually are.”
Hennig was moved to tears by the Depardieu film because she “felt very deeply the difficulty that Cyrano is in … because I’ve never been a slim, beautiful woman in a contemporary way,” she said. “I felt that any love I would get would be through my soul and that’s what Cyrano feels. Ultimately that’s actually what love is, is a connection of souls,” she said.
The central element in “Cyrano” that makes it a catfishing story — pretending to be someone else to get love — is for Hennig a dramatic device that’s “exaggerated in order that we see it in our own lives, so that we get a reflection that Cyrano is not lost on us,” said Hennig.
“We say, ‘Oh yeah, I get it. I see how this still happens today.’ ” “CYRANO DE BERGERAC” PLAYS AT THE SHAW FESTIVAL THROUGH MAY 8. SEE SHAWFEST.COM, CALL 1-800511-7429 OR 905-468-2172. KAREN FRICKER IS A TORONTO-BASED THEATRE CRITIC AND A FREELANCE CONTRIBUTOR FOR THE STAR.