The Blue Bird: a Fairy Play in Six Acts

This is an interesting story. It started out a little dull, quickly became Terribly fascinating a truly magical world for about 50 pages. . . then it just got weird. It sort of falls apart after the third act. Doesn't really have anywhere else to go and looses momentum. But it's so unique I still enjoyed reading it, just for curiosity to find out what would happen. I'd really love an attempt to see this live- on screen or on a stage, it's so fantastic it seems quite difficult to produce.There was an attempt to do this with Shirley Temple that failed miserably. I'd seen it about 12 years before reading this play. The only thing that remains true is the world of unborn children- the only scene I remembered from the movie. The Shirley Temple movie changes the lead characters and eliminates most of the supporting cast, so it doesn't feel like the same story. I chose this book because of the prestigious awards this author has won. At least half the book is worth reading. You may not want to finish it, but as it won't cost you anything to try, why not pick it up?

Great read! Eye opening!

There are some beautiful evocative scenes in this play. But mostly I was appalled at the sentimentality. The sequel is even worse. I was glad it was free.

Nice book, great edition, soft matte cover.

During his lifetime, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was regarded as one of the greatest European authors of the 20th Century, particularly noted for plays written between about 1890 and 1910, including PRINCESS MALEINE, INTRUDER, THE BLIND, PELLEAS AND MESISANDE, among others. Described as a “symbolist,” Maeterlinck’s writings often had a fairytale quality, and this is particularly true of his most famous play, THE BLUEBIRD, written in 1906 and first performed in Moscow in 1908. The play was, and to a certain extent remains, quite popular in Russia and eastern European theatre, which regards it as an allegory on socialism.The play’s story is about two peasant children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, who are awakened from their sleep by Berylune, a fairy who urges them to seek the blue bird of happiness. Accompanied by their faithful dog and dubious cat, and assisted by personifications of Light, Water, Fire, Sugar, and Bread, the children travel throughout a dream landscape where they meet numerous (and sometimes dangerous) creatures that include dead family members, spirits of joy and happiness, deceptive personifications of pleasure, and the spirits of children yet to be born. They capture several birds, but none of them are the blue bird, which they only find when they awaken from these vivid dreams with a greater appreciation of the world around them.Maeterlinck endows the play with considerable stage direction and description, and what he describes is so lavish in terms of design and special effects that it is difficult to imagine how any staging of the play could live up to the script. In spite of its previous popularity, contemporary theatre regards it with a ho-hum attitude, and it is perhaps best known to film buffs as the basis for two films—a 1940 Hollywood production starring Shirley Temple and a 1976 American/Soviet production directed by George Cukor and starring the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Ava Gardner—that were legendary disasters. Maeterlinck received the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature, but his fame has tarnished over the years, and even in its original form, THE BLUEBIRD has an extremely saccharine, extremely “twee” quality, and it is best read as a historical window onto the theatre of the early 20th Century. This is indeed a writer and a play whose moment has truly passed.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

as always the book arrived in good time and good condition. I'd heard of the play but never read it. An amazing piece that IU want to explore further. As a norm I dislkie paperbacks but wanted this quickly. I shall now get a hardback version as well as the music for the play.