Kathryn Hunter's production of The Birds is an attempt to marry aerial athleticism and Aristophanic satire. But instead of a genuine marriage one gets an uneasy co-habitation in which the cast's prodigious circus skills almost entirely swamp the political purpose of Sean O'Brien's new translation.
Having once appeared in a student production of the play, I thought I vaguely knew it; but time and again at the Lyttelton I found myself struggling to work out what was going on. The broad idea is that Pez and Eck, two Athenian refugees, invade the bird-kingdom with the idea of creating a democratic utopia. At first, they meet avian resistance but eventually an aerial paradise is created: one that banishes the gods and has sundry Athenians queueing up for citizenship. But the quest for utopia ends in autocracy with Pez turning into a tinpot dictator who finally marries Zeus's bride, Sovereignty.
For Aristophanes, writing in 414 BC at the time of the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily, the play was clearly a satire on fantasies of political omnipotence. But any modern production has to ask what the play means to us today. Given that Poseidon is turned into an American beauty-queen and Sovereignty into the Statue of Liberty, one assumes Hunter is sending up the militaristic presumption of the world's sole superpower. But the idea is only half-heartedly followed through and O'Brien's implicitly political text is virtually emasculated. At one point he invokes Clausewitz to make the point that war is the conduct of economic policy by other means: a resonant idea, with all the talk of invasion of oil-rich Iraq, yet the reference gets lost amidst the visual brouhaha.
As a piece of narrative theatre, the production is a near-disaster. What saves it is the inventiveness of Matt Costain's aerial choreography dazzlingly executed by Mamaloucos Circus. Like the daring young man on the flying trapeze, the birds swoop through the air with the greatest of ease. They also slither down strands of silk, sail out over the audience's heads and, with the aid of a trampoline, jump, spin and gyrate onto a high platform.
But aerial exuberance alone cannot make a play and the text simply gets lost amidst all this commotion. The casting of Marcello Magni as Pez also misses the point: the actor is a natural comedian whereas the character, in the words of one editor, is meant to be the still, sober centre of proceedings rather like radio's Kenneth Horne. Hayley Carmichael is also wasted as his sidekick, Eck, though she renders one speech on the impotence of parliamentary democracy with suitable venom. The final impression, however, is of a show in which acrobatic spectacle leaves political satire literally standing.
· Until August 14, then touring. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
