That must be one of the most beautiful, funny love idiots that has ever been written into a play. Hundreds of times Eitan has been to the university library, hundreds of times he has seen a book lying there, “Kitab Wafayat al-A’yan”, of which there is only one copy in this huge New York library, and he always wondered who read that. And then he sees her, Wahida, reading this book, and he tells her something about coincidences and non-coincidences, about the “impeccable harmony of coincidence” that he sees embodied in Wahida, which you really have to imagine impeccable, without any coincidence . And anyway, to blame for this encounter is the Big Bang, which is apparently repeating itself in Eitan’s head and heart. He, the geneticist, has never experienced anything like this, he raves and goes crazy, Wahida smiles, both are suddenly in love – and Magdalena Laubisch and Leonard Dick are just adorable.
Wajdi Mouawad premiered his play “Vögel” himself in 2017 in Paris, four years ago Burkhard C. Kosminski published it in German for the first time in Stuttgart. He took the four languages of the text – German, English, Hebrew, Arabic – and created a giant Babylonian tableau of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jochen Schölch does it completely differently at the Metropol-Theater and thus creates an exciting feat: he condenses the text with tremendous concentration and clarity, creates elegant scene transitions, lets everyone speak German and drills into the depths of the characters. An introspective crime thriller.
And since “Birds” is also an epistemological thriller like “King Oedipus”, you can’t tell the content at all, because you don’t want to rob future viewers of this excitement. But this much: the piece jumps back and forth between times and places – New York, Berlin, Israel – between love and horror. Wahida is Arab, Eitan from a Jewish family. His parents are horrified in different ways because of his love, Anastasia Papadopoulou as a mother is more analytically witty, Michaele Cuciuffo as a father is steaming, furious, desperate, scary. That’s great, then there are the grandparents, Sarah Camp and Wolfgang Jaroschka, and what Camp does is a pure sensation, iron-hard, way of life, consistent in every second. All sparkle here in the play of identities. Anna Graenzer is also enraptured by Wahida as an Israeli soldier, Gerd Lohmeyer hovers in the air as a scholar or rides on a white elephant. He would know the solution that does not come. What is coming is war, assassinations, massacres in the Middle East, love is dying. Or not?