"The play is a piece of grease! If I could do something like that once in 5acts, I and literature could be happy," Schnitzler says enthusiastically about his truly enchanting grotesque: "The better-off of Paris meet without knowing it on the eve of the French Revolution in the pub that gave the title to the film, in order to let professional actors fool them into believing that they are in the semi-conscious and criminal world - until the real revolutionary events spill into the "Green Cockatoo" inexorably deadly fashion. The highly virtuosic play with false expectations, fictionality and reality is one of the most amusing and at the same time wittiest that German literature has to offer.