THEATRE
Unfair to Insects
WEEK after week, to right and to left of me, other people are scrupidously weighing foreign films, foreign sculpture, foreign paintings. foreign orchestras. Only the theatre is starved of contact with the world beyond this island—except through the miracles of financial and diplomatic tact performed each.year by Mr. Peter Daubeny. This week Mr. Daubeny's third season of World Theatre opens at the Aldwych. If we cavil at all at the guest companies he brings, we are going not only to cut off our nose to spite our face (since the season won't pay its way unless the theatre is filled to 89 per cent of capacity); also, to feel beastly uncivil, considering that it is such a pleasure to see them at all.
Not that the problem ought to arise with the Czech National Theatre, since it is the company's habit to select for production only those plays which 'foster the ethics of man's fight for free- dom, progress and happiness, and advance the heritage of the great Czech and world dramatists.' An excellent policy but it seems to have slipped up badly on this occasion. The Insect Play (Karel and Josef Capek, 1921) fosters nothing except a sense of the insupportable tedium of life and all its works. The curtain has no sooner gone up than the play descends, an invisible curtain be- tween the company and ourselves of impene- trable, irredeemable infuriating naïveté, cutting them off more effectively than the language or any other barrier.
It is all the more tantalising since the director (Miroslav Machacek) gives us an introduction in which the actors in their street clothes spill down towards the footlights, beaming with affable, in-
fectious enthusiasm. It is a pleasure simply to. look at their faces—as always with these long- established, state-subsidised companies where promotion goes by experience and length of ser- vice and you don't find a Hamlet much under forty. 'Our thoughts are in our features,' wrote Steele (not in the Spectator as it happens, in the Taller), 'and the visage of those in whom love, rage, jealousy or envy have their frequent man- sions, carries the traces of these passions wherever the amorous, the choleric, the jealous or the envious, are pleased to make their appearance.' One would guess then that Mme Jirina Sejbalova• is a powerful actress and a grande dame of the company; and that M. Eduard Kohout--a face of folds and pouches confronting us with amiable, sardonic relish—would make an inimi- table Pandarus. But impossible to tell in this prim fable of insect life. Mme Sejbalova makes a brief, energetic appearance as the capitalist Mrs. Dung-Beetle, pursuing with fond pats the red rubber ball which represents her life savings and raison d'etre; M. Kohout turns Victor, the socialite butterfly, into an engaging, elderly roué ambling among plastic furniture (sets by Josef Svoboda) reminiscent more of Butlin's than the dolce vita. The only part which affords any grip to an actor is the Tramp, who represents humanity in the manner of the 'twenties, and pursues us throughout with appropriate morals. The brothers Capek evidently had a low opinion of their audiences' intelligence. Ladislav Pesek, playing him with fixed, ingratiating grin, proves that Communists can be as sentimental as our- selves when it comes to portraying a real, ripe member of the proletariat.
Unfair to actors, unfair to audiences, the play
is positively rebarbative in its attitude to insects. Insects, as we know from Fabre, lead fascinating lives in their own right. And when it comes to drawing parallels with human behaviour, a single stray fly- or beetle-image from Shakespeare goes deeper than we get in two and a half hours with the Capeks. Shakespeare has only to glance at the insect world to engage his sympathy and ours: . the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
With the Capeks the process is precisely the reverse. They touch on neither the human nor the insect world. It is a wonder to me how they manage infallibly to kill any possible concern for their lack-lustre butterflies, bourgeois crickets, opportunist flies, warmongering ants. They patronise not only their brother men but also the entire insect community, here presented solely for our disapproval. And experience tells us that life is never as simple as that, nor as implausibly dull.
M. Machacek, ignoring the play's ostensible content, concentrates with his designer on coups d'oeil, and does some extraordinarily beautiful things with mirrors and phosphorescent chiffon. Notably the dance of the butterflies, reflected and refracted against a rainbow background in mirrors suspended above the stage; and the triumphal entry of the Yellow Ant General—a saffron carpet swiftly unrolled down the slanting stage before him, and two tongues of yellow lick- ing simultaneously along the mirrors on either side. Decimated in length, with the dialogue re- moved and more inspiration in the choreography, this production would make a telling ballet.
HILARY SPURLING
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