The Caged Bird Sings opened last night at the Aga Khan Museum.  It’s a co-pro between the museum and Modern Times Stage Company (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) with Theatre ARTaud.  The play is written by Rouvan Silogix, Rafeh Mahmud and Ahad Lakhani. It’s based on the poetry of Rumi and deals with Sufi ideas of freedom, love and self-abnegation.  It’s sophisticated, often very funny and thought provoking.

There are three characters.  Sal has been in a sort of virtual cage for a thousand years.  He’s joined by the lovers Rumi and Jin (both women here) who have somehow fallen foul of authority for manufacturing and selling a love potion which certainly hasn’t been FDA approved and has some ethical issues with ingredient sourcing.  Sal also has a potion.  It will free whoever drinks it from all emotion; positive or negative, and he believes if he can get someone to drink it he will be free but he’s not prepared to do it himself.

Jin (who unknowingly ha been dosed with the love potion by Rumi) and Rumi spar constantly with each other about their backgrounds, commercial practices, ambitions, personal histories and their relationship.  Sal gets on both their nerves in a rather endearing way.  It’s a bit like Huis Clos with magic potions but with less of Sartre’s disdain for humanity.  It’s also much funnier.

As time passes in the Cage the characters find themselves acting out incidents and parables from the works of Rumi.  There are hyper-intelligent talking birds, assorted felines, a king and his slave/lover and much more but none of this gets them closer to escaping from the cage.  Only when the two potions get mixed, more or less by accident, does Rumi reach a form of enlightenment and resolution.

It’s staged in the round in a cage in the middle of the Aga Khan Museum courtyard (and, word to the wise, if when you go it’s as cool as it was last night dress warmly and take a blanket).  There’s atmospheric lighting, which becomes steadily more effective as the daylight fades, and a weird but effective echoey acoustic (“enhanced” by traffic from YYZ and emergency sirens).

The three actors are excellent.  Mikaela Lily Davies is a loud, assertive and rather feline Rumi who finds an excellent foil in the calmer, less agitated Jin of Navtej Sandhu.  Rouvan Silogix shifts mood and, at times it seems, shape as Sal who acts rather like the Fool in a Shakespeare play.  They work exceptionally well together.  Rafeh Mahmud’s direction keeps things moving at a brisk pace (21 scenes in three themed groups flash by in 90 minutes with some particularly fast pacing in the final section) without making things confusing but maintaining the essential ambiguity of the underlying philosophy.

The Caged Bird Sings is really quite a sophisticated concept executed well in an unusual and attractive setting.  It’s well worth the trek to the Aga Khan Museum but do dress warmly unless the evening promises to be especially clement.  It runs until June 26th.

Photo credits: Zeeshan Safdar