PRAGUE LETTER
BY the time these lines are in print people in New York will probably be engaged in either praising or damning the two imported Czech plays, R. U. R., and The World We Live In. Firmin Gemier is to produce R. U. R. at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris this winter and the other play is to be put on at Nigel Playfair's new playhouse in London, the Regent Theatre.
If the Cezch invasion of Broadway is successful another Capek play may eventually find its way across the Atlantic. Karel Capek has just finished it; at the moment it is only in manuscript.
The Affair Macropolus is one of those happy coincidences that happen now and again in the world of making books and plays. The theme of the play is that of Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, the idea of prolonging human life. But there is no suspicion of plagiarism. Capek began his play a long time before he heard about the Shavian Metabiological Pentateuch. He is content to call his play merely a Comedy.
In the seventeenth century during the reign of Rudolf the Second, the protector of all alchemists, there lived in Prague a Greek physician, Macropolus, who discovered something that would make a person live for three hundred years. Rudolf refused to be experimented on, so Macropolus gave it to his lovely daughter, Helen. The scene moves forward to modern times. An action is taking place in court over the legal ownership of an estate. Helen appears to give evidence, and because she is able to relate private incidents over a hundred years old she is compelled, with the alternative of being called an impostor, to declare her real age. She discovers that the Macropolus document containing her father's secret, for which she has been searching, is in this very estate. But Helen has the fatal power of her namesake of Troy. She excites the passions of all the men around her. Baron Prus, the owner of the estate, gives her the document in return for a night of love in her arms (a woman with a past of three hundred years should be quite an interesting amoureuse). Janek, her son, on learning this, commits suicide. Even her many-times-removed great-grandson is not im-
