A man, a woman, a parakeet: in the comedy in the Bayerischer Hof, the latter hovers in a cage above the heads of a well-to-do couple in an elegant, blue-grey living room. But he is also the eponym of the complex French conversation piece “The Parakeet” by Audrey Schebat, which was a great success when it premiered in 2017 at the Parisian boulevard theaters. In the comedy, Michaela May and Krystian Martinek embody the couple, who have been married for thirty years and remain nameless, with youthful verve. An indication that Shebat’s story could take place anywhere – not just like here in Paris, accompanied by Charles Aznavour’s “She”. Parakeets also flutter in Catherine’s newly opened ornamental bird storyline, but they only appear in conversation. Because the friends Catherine and David do not show up for the agreed meal. They had been broken into, explains David over the phone.
The vacuum that now arises is filled with assumptions and suspicions about the absent couple. While she bets on a “gang of burglars” who are talented in gymnastics because of Catherine’s stolen designer clothes, jewelry and shoes, he often doubts her sanity. Especially when she begins to interpret the evidence as evidence of a secret, quick and “courageous” separation. He wants to know what is “brave” about it. If a man makes off like that, he is considered a “pig” and a coward. Why do you rate the same action by a woman completely differently?
In this game, everyone involved is right and wrong at the same time
Questioning roles like these are among the strengths of Schebat’s play, which, under the direction of May’s husband Bernd Schadewald, pointedly and with many clever twists and turns picks apart the social model of marriage, not unlike the plays by fellow authors Yasmina Reza or Daniel Glattauer (in whose “miracle exercise” May last starred in the comedy). When Martinek, as a lawyer, takes up his wife’s through ball, who has just praised her friend Catherine for successfully selling eleven budgies a week, it leads to wonderfully abstruse comparisons. He ruthlessly calculates his own fees in budgerigars: a telephone consultation brings him and his law firm partner David “ten budgerigars”, and when it comes to the fees for lawsuits, he even uses parrots and cockatoos. And when he gets really angry, he slices a baguette, one piece per parakeet. Beaten flat in anger, they then fly across the stage – devoured by the tax office and Catherine’s designer clothes. For him, as a poor man-“drop”, only a small piece of all the money remains.
Undeterred by these material equations, she reproaches him for Catherine’s emotional situation in the “golden marriage cage.” Many years in which she gave up work because of the children and he nurtured his affairs. Which is why she now despairs of a lack of appreciation. But since she is no longer talking about the absent couple, but about her own life. A finely constructed game about gangs, in which everyone involved is right and wrong: Because they all helped tinker with the cage.
The parakeet, until March 6th, Comedy in the Bayerischer Hof