Barely a week after the Autumn Festival of the Community of Madrid presented the work of Wajdi Mouwad ‘Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons’, presented by La Colline – théâtre national, which he himself directs, another text by the Lebanese author – “one of the most profound, multifaceted and committed playwrights of current times”, in the words of Mario Gas– goes on stage in the Canal Theaters. It’s about ‘all birds‘, a work premiered in 1917 in Paris and which now comes from the hand of Pilar de Yzaguirre, in a production directed by Gas himself and performed by Aleix Peña Miralles, Candela Serrat, Vicky Peña (who has assumed the role that was initially expected to interpret Núria Espert), Manuel de Blas, Pere Ponce, Anabel Moreno, Lucía Barrado, Juan Calot, Núria García and Pietro Olivera.
‘All birds’ is a Contemporary ‘Romeo and Juliet’where Capulets and Montagues are Jews and Arabs and Verona moves to Israel. But this is only the starting point. «Wajdi Mouawad is neither an ‘agitprop’ author nor a didactic author. Its vocation is to explain stories narratively, with powerful, direct, sometimes metaphorical language, and with situations, characters and relationships wrapped in a poetic atmosphere. At the same time, he enters very directly and in a very harsh way from what he knows and has suffered in his own skin, like a Lebanese child born in a time of conflict. His look at that place in the world is a terrifying metaphor for the entire world. misunderstanding that exists between human beings. The pernicious identities, the paradoxes of loving one and despising the other, of not really knowing who you are; the conflicts of power, the ancestral struggles, the knives stuck in individual and collective throats throughout generations… All of this generates a body that is present in almost all of Mouawad’s works.
The author himself refers to the legend of the amphibian fish to approach his work. It says that a bird that sails through the sea and sees the fish inside feels curious to enter its world, so different. Someone warns him “Never go near those creatures. They do not belong to our world nor we to theirs. If you go to their world, you will die; just like they will die if they decide to approach us. Our world will kill them and their world will kill you. “We are not meant to meet.” The bird gives up but years later decides to try, and as soon as it crosses the surface of the water, it grows gills that allow it to breathe and tells the fish that it is one of them. “This story of mutation,” says Mouawad, “shocks me because of what it says about our time, our world and our relationship with each other, with the enemy, so to speak.”
The work, Mario Gas continues, “speaks of the mistakes that identity can lead you to, the paradox, the chance. And a network of human relationships is created. All identities that develop along false paths are nothing more than impediments for us all to understand each other and be what, ultimately, we are: different but very equal. “The other, the different, the strange, the foreigner, all of us, all of us, are or should be ‘us’,” adds the director. Forgetting this eloquent and resounding reality leads us inexorably to an inhospitable place: the house of hecatomb.
Mario Gas does not hide his admiration for the Canadian playwright of Lebanese origin, of whom he already directed ‘Incendios’, one of the most disturbing and fascinating productions of recent Spanish theater. «He is an author who, when you read him, penetrates you, disarms you. ‘All Birds’ has a conceptual, poetic structure, reminiscent of Greek tragedy, and also addresses, in a multifaceted way, the Palestinian-Israeli, so current these days, as a metaphor for the phagocytations and historical confrontations between communities that seem to They are different and there are not so many of them. It is a text that one cannot escape, and any director, upon reading it, really wants to put it on stage.
#Birds #Romeo #Juliet #Middle #East
