The Birds

Year & Context

1996

after Aristophanes (414 BC)

About the Production

Aristophanes wrote “The Birds” in 414 BC — in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, while Athenian troops marched on Sicily and Athens was driving itself toward catastrophe. What he created was political satire in disguise: two Athenians flee the decadence of their city, find the birds, and found — Cloudcuckooland. Suspended in the air between gods and men.

Theater der Klänge took on this material in 1996 — not as a museum piece, but as a cross-disciplinary investigation. The text adaptation by Jörg U. Lensing (partly also Clemente Fernandez), after translations by Schadewaldt and Kraus, distils and updates the comedy to its political core: the longing for another world, the construction of that world — and its immediate corruption by the very people who fled the first one. This is not merely an antique subject but a strikingly contemporary piece that happens to date from 414 BC.

What makes the play so pointed is the internal contradiction Aristophanes exposes: Pisthetairos, the Persuader, wants a just new world — and in founding it becomes a ruler who must turn away everyone seeking to exploit it for the same old purposes. The corruption does not come from outside: it comes from within. No sooner is Cloudcuckooland built than Athens sends its worst — the poet, the oracle-monger, the surveyor, the informer — all looking to do in the new city exactly what they did in the old one. Aristophanes laughs, but the laugh is cold.

Music lived on stage: Mathis Hagedorn on flutes, Thomas Wansing on percussion, psaltery and harmonium, Roland Weber on santouri, saz and bouzouki. Masks — European and Balinese — created the bird figures from pure body and form. Choreographic work by Jacqueline Fischer and Kerstin Hörner. The production toured to Thessaloniki and Paris as part of the anniversary retrospective in 1997/98 — the Paris run performed in French, the Thessaloniki performances in German with Greek subtitles. After almost 2,400 years, Aristophanes thus returned to Greece — in a modern adaptation, performed by a German company of decidedly international composition.

The result was a theatre evening that took Aristophanes seriously — without cutting the comedy.

Funded by the City of Düsseldorf (venue & production costs) · State of North Rhine-Westphalia / Ministry of Culture (production grant) · Stiftung Kunst und Kultur NRW (project grant) · Stiftung van Meeteren