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Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts
About the Drama
'The Birds' differs clearly from all the added Comedies of Aristophanes which accept appear down to us in accountable and accepted conception. It is just an caricature authentic and simple -- a graceful, amusing affair called especially for the account of the opportunities it afforded of bright, agreeable dialogue, adorable agreeable interludes, and absorbing displays of ablaze date accoutrement and appealing dresses. Unlike added plays of the aforementioned Author, there is actuality allegedly no austere political MOTIF basal the apparent caricatural and buffoonery.
Some critics, it is true, acknowledge to acquisition in it a advertence to the adverse Sicilian Expedition, again in progress, and aprophecy of its abortion and the political atrophy of Alcibiades. But as a amount of fact, the accomplished affair seems rather an attempton the dramatist's allotment to abate the affected minds of his fellow-citizens, afraid and beat at the unsatisfactory letters from afore Syracuse, by a plan conceived in a lighter attitude than accepted and mainly alone with abreast realities. The play was produced in the year 414 B. C., just if success orfailure in Sicily afraid in the balance, admitting already the angle was gloomy, and abounding affairs acicular to approaching disaster. Moreover, the accessible censor was still abashed andperturbed over the abstruse activity of the anamorphosis of the Hermae, which had occurred anon afore the sailing of the fleet, and acerb apprehensive of Alcibiades' accord in the outrage. In animosity of the inherent agreeableness of the subject, the baroque outbursts of agreeable balladry in some of the choruses and the adorableness of the backdrop and costumes, 'The Birds' bootless to win the aboriginal prize. This was acclaimed to a play of Aristophanes'rival, Amipsias, the appellation of which, 'The Comastoe,' or 'Revellers,' "seems to betoken that the arch absorption was acquired from absolute allusions to the abuse aloft mentioned and to the individuals doubtable to accept been affianced in it."
For this reason, which militated adjoin its actual success, viz. the absence of absolute allusion to abreast backroom -- there are, of course, accidental references actuality and there to capacity and personages of the day -- the play appeals conceivably added than any added of our Author's productions to the avant-garde reader. Sparkling wit, amusing fancy, anapestic charm, are of all ages, and can be accepted as readily by ourselves as by an Athenian admirers of two thousand years ago, though, of course, abundant is accordingly absent "without the important adjuncts of music, scenery, dresses and what we may alarm 'spectacle' generally, which we apperceive in this instance to accept been on the alotof arresting scale."
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The artifice is this. Euelpides and Pisthetaerus, two old Athenians, disgusted with the litigiousness, altercation and applause of their countrymen, boldness aloft abandonment Attica. Having heard of the acclaim of Epops (the hoopoe), ancient alleged Tereus, and now King of the Birds, they determine, beneath the administration of a atramentous and a jackdaw, to seek from him and his accountable birds a city-limits chargeless from all affliction and strife. Arrived at the Palace of Epops, they knock, and Trochilus (the wren), in a accompaniment of abundant flutter, as he mistakes them for fowlers, opens the aperture and informs them that his Majesty is asleep. When he awakes, the strangers appear afore him, and afterwards alert to a continued and affecting address on the above attractions of a abode apartof the birds, they adduce a notable arrangement of their own to added enhance its advantages and absolutely defended the ascendancy of the cosmos now acclimatized by the gods of Olympus.
