Brief 38: Cyrano de Bergerac

When we were 14 or 15, Rory Kinnear, who was in my year, played the lead role in a school production of 'Cyrano de Bergerac'.

I'd seen plenty of classical concerts by then, I'd seen amateur and professional stage productions, I'd seen live sport and sport on TV, but that was the first time I experienced a performance that was transcendent.

I saw an interview with Kinnear a few years ago when he was publicising Hamlet or Othello,  for one of those professional roles for which he was heavily acclaimed, and he joked that friends and family still said his best performance was Cyrano de Bergerac, at school, aged 15.

I'm sure, in real terms, it wasn't. I'm sure he's honed his craft an awful lot since then. I've seen him put on several outstanding performances on stage and screen.

But, honestly, that Cyrano. 

We knew Rory was talented, he'd stolen the show the previous year with a comic supporting role in whatever that play was. By that age, there'd been lots of school productions, I'd even been in a few myself, they were fun, everyone took it oh so seriously, occasionally someone was actually pretty good (many still talk about the gravitas I gave my 5 lines as Metellus in 'Androcles and the Lion'. As for Nick Symons as the lion ...)

But when I, and everyone else, watched Kinnear playing Cyrano, the air in the room changed. It was like that. 

Everyone felt it. The school buzzed with it in the next few days. It was hard to know what to say to him about it. From that point, the notion that he'd become an award-winning, scene-stealing, generational stage actor seemed inevitable. I'm sure he wouldn't see it as inevitable, and I'm sure it hasn't been that way in the slightest, but if you'd asked most of us who watched those three nights whether there was anyone in Britain better at acting at that point, and whether in time everyone would come to know it, we'd have said no.

I don't really know what my point is. Probably just that it really, probably was, even with the benefit of hindsight, as good as I think it was. That we were lucky to see it. 

I've had that feeling a few times since, not that many, but quite a few. At sport, at music, at the theatre ... something which feels genuinely special, not just interesting or exciting or good. It's rare.