Tel Aviv has quite a scarce presence of international theater tours, so I had quite great expectations from the presence of the Theatre La Colline, one of the National Theaters of France, which brought here the performance of ‘Tous Des Oiseaux’ (‘All the Birds’) written and put on stage by the director of the Theater, the Lebanese-born Canadian Wajdi Mouawad. It’s quite an interesting production by a theater which is supported by the French government and has the declared mission of bringing to stage contemporary and novel productions. The theater may be French but the play is spoken in four languages, none of them French – English, German, Hebrew and Arabic. The theme is identity – individual and collective identity – especially Jewish and Arab, in a world where the conflict between Jews and Arabs defines to some extent their identities and occupies the souls and minds of the two people, and not only of them.
source https://www.theatreonline.com/Spectacle/Tous-des-oiseaux/61880
Let me start with the good things. It’s a complex text and the solutions used by the playwright-director contribute to fluency and help in telling the story. The sets are composed by dark panels which define the space, tables that turn quickly into hospital beds and a few chairs, all functional and simple, letting the talented actors express their feelings with their natural tools – bodies and voices. The actors themselves are too emphatic in many moments, but they act with passion and overcome many of the hurdles of the text. The switches and mixes of the four languages came in very naturally and illustrate very well the background of the characters.
source http://www.cameri.co.il/perfs/1826
source http://www.cameri.co.il/perfs/1826
source http://www.cameri.co.il/perfs/1826
The principal problem of the play is the approach taken by the text in dealing with issue of the Jewish identity. It’s not the first time that a play by an Arab author dealing with the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is presented on an Israeli stage. It’s also not the first time that the issue of Jewish identity is brought to stage here, in plays written by Israeli and non-Israeli authors. It is the first time (as far as I know) that an Arab playwright brings here a play heving Jewish identity as central theme, and my feeling was that Wajdi Mouawad could not avoid the bias and the collection of clichees. I am used with the Jewish nationalistic bias and I do not like it. Here we get a negative bias and I did not like it either. The text is also quite long, the whole performance lasts four hours, and it’s not all efficient, there are quite a lot of repetitions and and excess of verbosity. It was an interesting experience with mixed theatrical results.