After the successes of Bohemian lights at the Spanish Theater and 1936 at the National Dramatic Center, the great bet of the Teatros del Canal arrived, All Birds, one of the most anticipated works of the season with one of the most famous directors on the national scene, Mario Gas, who premiered the great author of the theatrical intellectuality, the Lebanese Wajdi Mouawad. It couldn’t be. In the end, and despite a good text, the result was a disappointing montage.
Wajdi Mouawad (1968, Lebanon) is an actor and theater director, but above all he is an author. He emigrated to France at the age of eight in the middle of the Lebanon War, and then settled in Canada’s Quebec at the age of 13, the city where he studied and began his theatrical career. His theater is a theater of the word that draws on the most classical tradition, such as Greek theater, to be able to face what tears him apart: the political and human situation in the Middle East that the Lebanese addresses from everyday life, listening to how they operate in the lives of citizens injustice, anger, horror and uprooting.
His career blossomed in 2003 with Firesa work that arrived in Spain in 2006 and that Mario Gas edited in 2016 with a powerful cast headed by Núria Espert – which would later become a film by Denis Villeneuve -. Today, his works are performed all over the world and for 8 years Mouawad has directed the Théâtre National de la Colline, one of the great theaters of France located in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. It was there that Mouawad, as a letter of introduction, premiered this work, a production that has had more than 150 performances in that country.
all birds tells the story of two young people (Aleix Peña and Candela Serrat) who fall in love in New York, he of Jewish origin, she of Arab origin. It will be on a trip to Israel where both characters will face their past and their origins. The structure is the same as Firesthe same as the Greek tragedy where the hero has to face the truth and his destiny. But the text, more than being indebted to Firesis the other side of the coin. If in that work the author faced the story of an Arab family, in this case Mouawad will focus on that of a Jewish family.
The author masterfully intertwines the history of that family with the historical events that go through it. The work takes place between two time frames, the present and the years preceding the Lebanon War that took place between 1975 and 1990. Specifically, it goes back to 1967, the year in which Israel displaced more than 100,000 Palestinians to that country, destabilizing the balance of a society where Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted.
The author traces a journey of more than fifty years of massacre and pain to delve deeper into a conflict that does not seem to have a solution. It shows us characters who cling to supposed identities and convictions that will gradually fall apart during the play. Each one will finally face their truth, that of having hidden the horror, that of believing in national or racial identities built on hatred of the other, or that of an uprooted youth that discovers that it has been rejecting its roots for years in order to fit in. in a consumer society that proclaims itself as the only guarantor of freedom. A choral process in which we will see Pere Ponce interpret a true Oedipus who will end up being the tragic symbol of these two peoples as intertwined as they are in conflict.
But unfortunately Gas, in this first production in Spanish of the work, wastes both the dramatic games proposed in the text and its poetic and tragic capacity. The director solves the different times and the succession of superimposed scenes in the work, a true theatrical play proposal of the author, with dark conventions or obvious light changes. Nor does it accompany the indiscriminate use of the screen as decoration that is intended to be passed off as a conceptual or poetic exercise and that does not contribute much, rather it is dull. A combination of obstacles that make this proposal with overtones of “large production” hampered in rhythm and character.
But the great obstacle of the montage lies in how the text is said and interpreted. The play was going to premiere with Nuria Espert as the grandmother of the Jewish family, Leah. Due to health problems, the actress had to abandon the project. She is played by another renowned actress, Vicky Peña, a partner in many of the director’s theatrical adventures. And he does it with solvency, there is no problem there. It is the direction of actors that weighs down the organicity and drama of certain texts. Something that is evident in the great speeches of the work where political, philosophical and poetic reflection come together with a great charge of emotion that shocks the character who says them.
Most of them Gas decides that they are said frontally, to the public. Tell them to the world, thus imposing the discursive over the theatrical. The great example of this problem is the scene of the young couple’s breakup. Wahida, the bride of Arab origin played by Candela Serrat, discovers her people on her trip to Israel when she crosses the wall to the West Bank and finds her roots. It is a beautiful conversion text, full of pain because this discovery simultaneously leads him to separate from the one he loves.
This work, in a somewhat simplistic way, has been presented on numerous occasions as a Romeo and Juliet where the Capulets and the Montagues are Jews and Arabs. But it is true that this theme is one of its most relevant subplots. That is why it is incomprehensible that this breakup scene is performed with both actors looking at the audience, hieratic and without the words influencing the other.
It is worth highlighting, however, the respect for the word of the proposal, both in the great translation by Coto Adánez, published by The Broken Nailas in the assembly itself that does not cut or select. The public can thus get closer to Mouawad’s universe. Some words that today are inseparable from a pressing present in which Israel has been at permanent war with Gaza for more than a year in a conflict that does not stop expanding and that today is experiencing a more than fragile truce, precisely, once again, with Lebanon. It is impossible when watching the work not to think about how many lives remain to be cut off in this spiral of rage that is fed every day and never stops causing horror, death, injustice and humiliation.
Therefore, being able to witness the reflections of this Arab thinker, his hopeless gaze, who knows that today there is no possible reconciliation, is of great value. The humanity of his view on the Jewish people is in itself the most hopeful thing about the proposal. Other reflections such as the necessary care of words and the concept of truth are another. Oedipus tore out his eyes not because of the truth, but because of the speed at which he received it, “what kills the Formula 1 driver is not the wall, but the speed at which he crashes,” says the character Norah ( Anabel Moreno) in the work. The will to investigate the past to find the truth is one of the values of this work, but the reflection of what to do with that truth, whether to throw it on the other or take care of each word so that it is understood over time, is perhaps where it lies. the heart of this piece.
all birds It is perhaps one of the most important Lebanese works of the last decade. It is a shame that the staging of this same work that the company The Pearl 29 by Oriol Broggi premiered this year and has attracted great criticism, highlighting its spatial and aesthetic proposal. Although it is not surprising. The other five productions that this company has made about this author have not been able to be seen outside the Catalan circuit either.
The playwright Sanchis Sinisterra defended in this newspaper the need to normally see works in Catalan, Basque or Galician with subtitles on Madrid billboards. If the public attends without problems a work by Mouawad subtitled in French (something that could be seen precisely in this last edition of the Autumn Festival in a minor work by the Lebanese, Day of nights chez les Cromagnons), It seems feasible that the same thing could happen with a production in Catalan. The density and richness of this work and its political and ethical relevance in these complicated moments are well worth it.
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