Beware: The hijacking of a classic…

On the day of their 18th birthday, the twins Renzo and Barbarina discover that Truffaldino and Smeraldina, whom they believed to be their parents, rather found them on a river where they derived abandoned. Eager to discover their true family, they adventure away from their adoptive parents’ tripe shop. Aided by a strange green bird, they will face the malicious and cruel Queen Tartagliona, witch of multiple powers and mother of King Tartaglia who mourns the loss of his wife Ninetta and his two children, vanished 18 years earlier…

Carlo Gozzi’s “fiabesque” tale, The Green Bird was primarily meant as a reply to Italian theatre’s reformists as well as to their leader, Carlo Goldini. If time finally demonstrated that his enemy was right, Gozzi successfully proved that Italian comedy did not necessitate Goldini’s realism to please and that during this XVIIIth century dominated by Light and Rationality, human beings predominantly needed dreams and magic.

Two hundred fifty years later, Man is still dominated by (ir) Rationality and the Lights of past have become today’s technology. Yet, the modern Human requires dreams and magic more than ever. If Gozzi made use of an old tale to triumph over Goldini, we have decided to make use of Gozzi’s play to render triumphant the magic which made us dream: That of theatre and its conventions.

A true homage to theatre and its freedom of creativity, The Green Bird, commedia dell’arte… plunges the spectator into the theatre of his childhood dreams where there is no fourth wall, where boredom does not fit in and where possibilities are endless. Costume changes can be observed, the music is live, puppets, masks… All is in plain view; nothing is hidden in order to reveal the most beautiful magic of all: the delight of theatre.