The annals of theatre history and theatre production celebrate the work of Joseph and Karel Čapek. During the 1910s and 1920s the brothers Čapek actively participated in the progression of Czech experimental art and literature in general, Josef as a visual artist and Karel as a writer and translator. Following the international appeal of their initial collaboration, the play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R. U. R.), the Čapeks went on to stage the satirical allegory titled The Insect Play (‘And so ad infinitum’). The tripartite structure of the play (not taking into account the prologue and the epilogue) revolves around a rather simplistic premise (hence, the debatable literary qualities of the text in a post-modern read-through): a Tramp departs from the world of (hu)man(ity) and experiences an awakening reverie in the world of the insects. There he encounters butterflies, care-free, vain creatures, obsessed with their appearance and comfort; then come the beetles, a bit kinder beings, at least when it comes to taking care of their own kind; and then the ants, gruesomely dedicated creepers who toil for the perseverance of the one-for-all ideal. The Tramp also meets up with an insect named Chrysalis, a presence whose voice continuously announces her imminent birth and the coming of greatness. At the closing of the play, a few flying insects, referred to as Ephemera, dance in celebration of Chrysalis’ birth. They all, including Chrysalis, die dancing. The Tramp struggles with his new found joy and trust in life, only to give in and surrender to the enticement of the coming light. Synopsis aside, the content and framework of The Insect Play prove far worthier for post-modern dissemination than it may first appear.
If we examine the different classes of life as presented by the Čapeks in their allegorical rendition of humanity’s social and historical development, we come to bear witness to a rather powerfully cynical appraisal of our kind. The butterflies could be viewed as a representation of the narcissistic leisure class, always in pursuit of self-centered pleasures. The beetles hint at the presence of the prosperous bourgeois capitalist middle-class, fiercely protecting their own while profiting from the misfortune of others. Finally, through the ants, we are exposed to an all-too real construal of a collective tyranny, an obvious allusion to the Soviet communist model, turning into a blood-thirsty military dictatorship. However, the message of the Čapeks’ play was received with mixed reviews. Even those critics who acknowledged the importance of the play’s closing scene questioned the writers’ intentions behind the plotline’s negative philosophy. After all, the 1920s were the quintessential happy days (the world was slowly recovering from the devastation of World War I and the Great Depression was a few years away). A 21st century reader of the Čapeks’ cautionary tale may also find the crude simple-mindedness of the allegory and the nihilism of the message overdone, to say the least. Such a reader could even argue that the Čapeks themselves re-thought the depressive tone of the play thus writing a second ending in which the character of the Tramp does not die. And yet, the piercing reality of present-day human society attests to the clarity of the play’s prophetic resonance. The Holocaust, the labor camps of Soviet Russia, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, The Cold War, the Bosnian War, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia, East Timor, the Ivory Coast, the World Trading Center, Afganistan, Iraq. As the curtain is about to fall, children are seen dancing and singing on stage. There is hope in the world of man as the Čapeks saw it, as long as we allow for our future to grow up and learn from our mistakes.
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