L'oiseau bleu

The Blue Bird (L’Oiseau bleu) is Maurice Maeterlinck’s celebrated symbolist fairy play about two poor woodcutter’s children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, sent on a magical journey to find the Blue Bird of Happiness. Guided by the fairy Bérylune and the luminous figure of Light, they cross dreamlike worlds—the Land of Memory, the Palace of Night, the Forest, and the Kingdom of the Future—only to learn that what they seek may be closer than they imagined. Premiered on 30 September 1908 at Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, the play became an international classic and helped cement Maeterlinck’s reputation, shortly before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature (1911) for his dramatic works.