Though the most celebrated plays of the expressionist pioneers have failed to make a place for themselves in the German repertory, they have had their effect. Playwrights who might have written in the conventional mode have been turned towards a freer technique, and they have succeeded in accomplishing interesting and promising things. The most notable of the plays thus produced, Masse-Mensch, deserves a chapter to itself. I shall write here of two lesser works by Karel Capek, one seen in the Czech National Theater, where it was first produced, the other read in a German translation.
In the first, The Insect Comedy, Karel Capek’s brother, a scenic artist, has a share as collaborator. It is a fantastic and picturesque piece of satire providing excellent opportunities for the newer methods in production. It is a comment on post-war conditions as symbolized in the life of butterflies, beetles, and ants. The prolog finds a young man wandering in the woods, and puts him comfortably to sleep on a grassy bank after a little talk with an absurdly pedantical entomologist. He sleeps through the three succeeding acts surrounded and occasionally disturbed by figures of insects grown life-size. The first act passes with the brilliant butterflies, who stand for the heedless, unproductive men and women of the social and pseudo-artistic worlds with time for only chatter and flirtation while disaster rumbles beneath them. In the production of this scene, the régisseur, K. H. Hilar, keeps the players moving ceaselessly, their hands and heads lightly undulating, with the restlessness of the antennæed world, while high around the back of the scene various of the brightly costumed insects constantly dance behind the translucent curtain of the woods.
In the second scene the humble grubs crawl in and out of their burrows on busy errands of accumulation. These are the assiduous profiteers and misers of war-time society. The act ends in a broad touch of comedy. A beetle has been murdering passing insects and dragging their bodies down below for his wife to hoard. There enters The Parasite, a tramp bug. He does not work. Why should he? He has only to wait for the busy capitalists of his world to fill their larders. Then, when the time comes, he will rise—or more accurately descend—and the wealth of the world will be his. He ducks into the beetle’s hole, and in a few moments he comes up, a swollen and jovial Communist, dancing in glee. The ever-present prompter’s box serves conveniently for one of the holes, and the background of green and black woods is projected instead of painted; otherwise there is little of interest in the staging of this scene.
The third act carries us to the ants. Here are the eternal laborers, tramping in an endless circle upon their work, under the eye of superiors very like officers and to a rhythm beaten out by a more privileged one of their own number. The Capeks costume the army of ants in khaki, puttees and all, and provide a desolate hill for a background. It might be blasted by either war or commerce. Into its surface descend shafts that might lead to either mines or dugouts. A glowering background of crazy chimneys and telegraph poles and smoke—all projected on the cyclorama—completes the picture. Presently there come shouting and a courier. More couriers. War threatens. The ants drop their burdens for rifles and continue their march. The officer-ants assume a higher station and even loftier phrases of command; from the back they philosophize and give orders in good old Kaiser-fashion. The act culminates with a conflict and the lordship of a new race of ants.
The epilog is divided between the appearance from her chrysalis of an ephemera of whom the sleeping man has been dimly and hopefully conscious in the last two scenes, her death after a dance with other short-lived mayflies, and the despairing end of the human visitor. This end is commented upon in a half satiric and half aspiring vein through the introduction of a group of wanderers who come upon the dead body, gaze at it in astonishment and sadness for a moment, and then pass on, singing, upon the ever-creative way of the peasant.
R. U. R., Karel Capek’s other play (in German, W. U. R.) is a tale of a Frankenstein such as H. G. Wells might have written in his earlier days. It seems both gruesomely effective and at times philosophic. The letters “R. U. R.” are an abbreviation of the name of a firm engaged in manufacturing “Roboters,” or workmen stamped out and given life by a machine. After a not very skilful exposition of the nature of this new device for lightening the world’s work, the play passes on to show the degenerating effect upon mankind of ceasing to labor. The “Roboters” are given pain in order to remind them not to be careless and break their legs and arms. Thereupon they acquire something not unlike a soul. Presently comes a consciousness of their station and their power. They rise and kill all mankind—except one man. Later they find to their dismay that the secret formula of the materials from which they were stamped out has been destroyed. They wear out in twenty years. And there will be an end. The last act shows their frantic appeal for a way to perpetuate themselves. The one man finds it at last when he recognizes love awakening in a male and a female “Roboter.” The process of mankind will begin once more. Rather the sort of end that Anatole France would have put to the story—Frankenstein turned man.
None of this, of course—either Kaiser or Capek—is Expressionism very far on its way. Some of it is trivial. Some is interesting enough. Much is decadent or uncertain. But it is not difficult to believe that there is something of the future in it. It is a sign. There is a starlike gleam in even the worst of the mire. Vitality, though often a morbid vitality, animates it. When we see Eugene O’Neill saying Nay to Realism in the same fashion, and turning out so strong and significant a play as The Hairy Ape—a play that grows greater in the perspective of Europe—it is not very difficult to hope and to look forward.
In the artists who give Expressionism a physical form and a pictorial atmosphere upon the stage we find still more of hope. They have gone more quickly and more securely towards their goal. They have had a disciplinary practice upon the plays of an earlier time, a time before Realism. They are freed from the moral problems of the writer; and where their work is distempered with the morbidity, the unhealthiness, of so much of our time, the result is less obvious in color or design than it would be if it took the form of words. And they have had behind them the history and the example of the movement in art which we once called Post-Impressionism, but which follows logically into Expressionism, the movement of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp.
The problem for the expressionist play is the problem of music. And yet not its problem; for music, being so markedly apart from actuality in its materials, has made few and not very successful attempts at the Realism which has swamped our stage. Music has been by very nature expressionistic. It has failed whenever, as program music, it approached the suggestion of the actual. For the rest, it has soared, soared easily, surely, towards direct expression of spiritual reality. Expressionism in the theater has to seek the way of music, the way towards beauty and ecstasy. The difficulty of the playwright is that he must always feel the pull of the actual life about him; he must make his drama out of human beings and not out of pure vision or pure emotional response. The world about him is corrupt and corrupting outwardly, as well as beautiful and wonderful within. He cannot, like the musician, leap away from its entanglements by putting his hands to an instrument of abstract art. But he can gain a certain release by forswearing as much as possible the reproduction of the actual.