Will there ever be solace for Jews and Palestinians?
Mario Gas masterfully directs the Spanish version of Wajdi Mouawad's 'Todos pájaros' (All Birds).
- Director: Mario Gas
- Performers: Vicky Peña, Aleix Peña, Candela Serrat, Manuel de Blas, Pedro Ponce, Anabel Moreno, Lucía Barrado, Juan Calot, Nuria García, Pitero Olivera
- Apolo Theater. Until May 18
It is unusual for the same work to have two premieres in a few months. But for those who knew the moving tragedy of Wadji Mouawad, Oriol Broggi premiered at the Library in June, we must recommend that you visit the Teatro Apolo now to see and hear (now in Spanish) Mario Gas's take on a tremendously topical play, even more so given the genocide in Gaza. This recommendation obviously extends to those unfamiliar with the play and to one of the most important playwrights of this century.
As we said following the premiere at the Library, All birds It speaks of the ongoing tragedy between Jews and Palestinians and is based on an impossible love story like that of Romeo and Juliet. A love that seeks to overcome historical conflicts and the pain of those unable to overcome the past. Eitan is a young Jewish New Yorker who studies the human genome. In a library, he meets Wahida, a girl of Arab origin with whom he falls in love and with whom he embarks on a journey to Israel in search of the true story of her father.
The scent of 'Incendis'
All the elements of Moauwad's theater emerge in this nearly three-hour performance. The initiatory journey, the search for identity, origins, radicalism, the confrontation between science and soul in an intimate story that, reflecting individual positions, amplifies the social and political conflicts that separate two peoples so close and that strike us with the anonymous immensity of their sorrows. We hear the scent and the dramatic explosion of that devastating Fires with which we discovered the author.
The gaze of Mario Gas, which he also directed Fires, refers to classical theater and seems imbued with a certain Brechtian detachment that makes the zigzags of the plot very understandable. It does so without, in the least, renouncing the rally of emotions or the humor emanating from certain contradictions and the sharp reactions of a magnificent Vicky Peña as the forgotten "old witch."
On an austere stage space (Sebastià Brosa) crowned by an evocative screen (Álvaro Luna), Gas masterfully directs a cast with precise (and that's important) oral and emotional diction. The stage journey, full of long monologues, closes with Eitan's plea before his father's corpse: there will be no consolation until Jews and Palestinians live together in harmony. A desire, a shared dream that, alas, we see increasingly distant.
