drama which is supposed to be flourishing in Russia takes on the task of making the theatre acceptable to the proletarian masses.
The Land of Many Names is pure Expressionism. A new continent has arisen out of the sea and a capitalist, Dollarson, taking advantage of the general desire to escape from this crumbling Europe, starts a company to colonize it. There is a war to decide the ownership of the new land, and after allowing itself to be conquered, it very inconsiderately sinks under the sea again. The moral of the play is contained in a speech by one of the characters, Pieris, a poet, who cries out that here, beneath our feet, is the new Land of Hopes.
This type of play acts far better than it reads. It is written for the stage and certainly not for the study. The looseness of its structure gives an incredible amount of freedom to the dramatist who can throw in any characters he likes, they may be as real as the people we meet in the street, or as fantastic as his imagination may wish them to be. Coarse everyday slang follows poetical speech; passages that are reminiscent of the best parts of the Bible merge into the obscenities that accompany a street-brawl. Crowds of people rush in and out; armies of soldiers are heard marching behind the scene; filmed aeroplanes come rushing towards one; while raucous voices yell through megaphones.
It seems as if the dramatist would catch the whole movement of life to imprison it within his short play; as if he would hold up the mirror to our disintegrating existence; as though by doing so he could give a new direction to our actions, a meaning or purpose to our meaningless lives. Especially is the fact of the unity of mankind underlined, and doubly emphasized whenever disaster overtakes him. Man is like a wayward child crying for the moon, for all that it sees: Wealth, Land, Gold, Liberty, Peace of the Soul, Escape, Forgetfulness, Health, Sleep, and God! He gives strange names to the new land: Land of Hopes, New Paradise, Land of Plenty, New Utopia, New Zion, Land of the Strong, Land of Marx, Land of Lenin, and a dozen others. But man is not to find his soul in the search for desired possessions or pilgrimages to new lands with new names.
Joseph Capek is Joseph the Dreamer. He dreams of a life, purified and clear, free from subtleties and modern sophistication. It is to be a life in which we shall all be human, all divine, finding our happiness in the service of our fellow-man, finding beauty in the
