Cyrano on the Moon

Translated, Edited and Performed by
Eileen Pollock

Cyrano de Bergerac did exist, did have a big nose, was a swashbuckler but, aged 19, gave up the wenching in favour of philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. Coming back from the tavern one moonlit night, his proposal that the moon was a world just like ours, whose inhabitants no doubt thought of our world as their moon caused such an outburst of dismissive mirth in his fellows that he decided the only way to prove it was to go there.

This is a snatch – a soupcon! – a matchbox account of his fabulous and often very funny lunar expedition, how he gets there and what he finds: the ‘people’, their ‘languages’, (which, being a bright boy, he manages to pick up), their Utopian ideals and most extraordinary of all – futuristic inventions that pre-vision things not invented until many centuries later. One device bears an uncanny resenblance to the iPod!

The book, written in 1645, so challenged the orthodoxy of his day that it had to be passed surreptitiously from hand to hand, ‘undergroun’ fashion and wasn’t published until after his death.

Divadlo Na Pradle – Kavarna
Besedni 3
Mala Strana
Praha 1

28th May – 2nd June, 2010
21:30