This essay was written in 1983, when Burgess’s verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi in the leading role. The production was a great success: Michael Billington, the long-standing theatre critic of the Guardian, wrote about the ‘bold, emotionally unashamed’ […]

In 1970 Anthony Burgess was commissioned by the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to make a new translation of Edmond de Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. The artistic director Michael Langham was looking for a sharp, witty approach to the text and Burgess aimed to recreate what he described in You’ve Had Your Time as ‘the […]

New research into the Foundation’s archive of literary manuscripts has uncovered a number of previously unknown poems and songs by Anthony Burgess. To celebrate the 104th anniversary of Burgess’s birth on 25 February 2021, and the US publication of Collected Poems on the same date, we are presenting one of the new poems here. ‘A […]