'Destroyed' Edmond Rostand play discovered

A long lost play written by the creator of Cyrano de Bergerac has been discovered in national archives more than a century after the author attempted to destroy all copies.

• Edmond Rostand, who was feted as a French William Shakespeare when he brought out Cyrano in 1897, was appalled by his first play after it was panned by critics as “indecent” and “insane”.
• The Red Glove, a vaudeville comedy written a decade before Cyrano and when the author was just 20, was pulled after 17 performances.
• Rostand was so ashamed of the work after the success of Cyrano that he paid a theatre not to put it on and the manuscript was thought to have been lost forever.
• The convoluted first act takes place in the Musée Grevin, Paris’ Madame Tussauds, in which characters pretend to be waxworks then jump out to seduce female onlookers. They are looking for love letters hidden in a shop sign in the shape of a red glove.
• Critics slammed the play – co-written by his fiancee’s half-brother – as unseemly. In one scene an actress appears in “a short skirt and corset” and in another men are in underclothes.
• One described it as “wanton insanity” containing “not a single spiritual word”. By the end of the fourth and final act, Le Figaro wrote at the time, “there was no one left in the theatre”.
• More than a century after it was put on a French professor has stumbled on an unsigned copy hidden in the censorship section of the French national archives.
• Prof Michel Forrier said the play had “a certain youthful charm”, but there was little evidence of the genius of Cyrano in the work.
• Cyrano’s neo-romantic hero, a long-nosed Frenchman who seduces with verse not looks, was recently immortalised on screen by Gerard Depardieu, and adapted in Roxanne starring Steve Martin and Darryl Hannah.
• His tirades were responsible for introducing the word “panache” into the English language.
• However, the Red Glove, served an important role in Rostand’s literary development.
• “He was so wounded by his first theatrical venture that he left prose theatre for verse. Without this failure, which allowed him to improve his style and find his voice, he might never have produced his masterpiece ten years later,” Prof Forrier said.
• The play will be published on August 10 along with 31 previously unseen letters to his fiancée and future wife, Rosemonde Gérard.
• In the letters, he rails against his detractors for his “unwarranted failure” and promises to win glory – making a premonitory reference to his own misshapen nose.
• “They told me just now that people with a wonky nose were spiritual but lacked inspiration. It flattered and vexed me. We shall see about that.”