The Blue Bird (play)

The Blue Bird

Mytyl and Tyltyl in the MAT's 1908 production
Written by Maurice Maeterlinck
Date premiered 30 September 1908 (1908-09-30)

The Blue Bird (French: L'Oiseau bleu) is a 1908 play by Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck. It premiered on 30 September 1908 at Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre and has been turned into several films and a TV series. The French composer Albert Wolff wrote an opera (first performed at the N.Y. Metropolitan in 1919) based on Maeterlinck's original play.

The story is about a girl called Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl seeking happiness, represented by The Blue Bird of Happiness, aided by the good fairy Bérylune.

Maeterlinck also wrote a relatively little known sequel to The Blue Bird, entitled The Blue Bird and the Betrothal.

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Film and TV adaptations

Maurice Maeterlinck's 1908 play The Blue Bird (L'Oiseau Bleu) has been adapted numerous times for film and television:

Mentions in other works

RahXephon
Blue birds appear as symbols and one of the characters is named "Michiru", which is the Japanese name for Mytyl.
Eureka Seven
Three of the characters were named after the author's name, his surname being divided: Maurice, the eldest of Eureka's children; Maeter, the second oldest; and Linck, the youngest. The book itself also appears briefly in the series being read by one of the characters.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Kyon seemingly randomly asks Haruhi if she has read The Bluebird of Happiness. This initially appears to be a random reference, however it has since been noted that the Land of Memory, the Palace of Night and the Kingdom of the Future which appear in L'Oiseau bleu may each correspond to one of Haruhi's three unusual companions (the aliens, the espers, and the time travellers, respectively.) This is also a reference as to how what Haruhi is searching for (aliens, time travelers, espers, or anything out of the ordinary) is around her every day. In the manga, Kyon comments on it as a "children's book". He refers to his "Bluebird of Happiness" on several occasions later in the novel.
Ballet Shoes
In the novel Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild and the television adaptations of it, Pauline and Petrova Fossil play Tyltyl and Mytyl in their ballet academy's production of "The Blue Bird".
K-PAX
Prot helps one of the patients by assigning him three tasks, the first of which is to find the Bluebird of Happiness.
L'Oiseau bleu/Aoi Tori
Japanese TV drama from 1997 telling a "tale of tragic love between Yoshimori, a station employee at a quiet, rural station, and Kahori, the wife of the heir to a family fortune." Kahori's daughter Shiori is reading "L'Oiseau bleu" as a child and the story is cited several times during the 11 episodes.
Yellow Submarine
At the end of the movie, the Chief Blue Meanie says that "My cousin is the 'Bluebird of Happiness'". It also shows bluebirds on his head when he says this.
Birds in the Future
In this manga by Osamu Tezuka, one chapter is directly inspired by the play.
Jean Libon, Belgian painter 
He uses to call one of his exposition "L'oiseau bleu". Until this day, "L'oiseau bleu" is the symbol of his work, full of mystic and magic.
Pokémon
In Try for the Family Stone!, 616th episode of the anime featured in the twelfth season, two siblings called Ltyl and Mytyl (in the Japanese version) search for a Dusk Stone in order to evolve a Murkrow. The Pokémon Swablu and Altaria are also references to the titular bird, and were named "Tylt" and "Tyltalis" respectively in Japanese.

Other references

The Dutch school types Mytyl schools and Tyltyl schools are named after Mytyl and Tyltyl: they are for children with a physical disability and for children with both a physical and mental disability, respectively. The Scouting Nederland section for children with special needs (Extension Scouting) is named: "Blauwe Vogels" (Blue Birds).

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of "Maurice Maeterlinck's greatest contemporary success The Blue Bird", as it was termed, his play was selected as the main motif of a high-value collectors' coin: the Belgian 50 euro Maurice Maeterlinck commemorative coin, minted in 2008.

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References