simple things of our daily life; not because we believe in any special social theory, but because it is our only salvation.
This naïve simple faith, shining through the bitter corroding satire of the Capek plays, gives them a freshness, a wood-fragrance, that makes them doubly welcome in the post-war theatre, full of the musty past.
We have had one other play of this type this season: The Upheaval, an extraordinarily ambitious attempt on the part of a Czech dramatist, Stanislav Lom, to make a convincing play out of the events which led up to the bloodless Revolution which brought Czecho-Slovakia into being at the end of the War.
The opening scene, which takes place in Eternity, reveals two figures: one, flame-lit, proud and magnificent, the other, rising out of the shadows, ragged and sinister. In this scene the author has tried to symbolize the conflict between the abstract conception of our desires and the concrete realization of them. Then follow five acts, scene after scene of satire, symbolism, and caricature. Czech public and political life, both during the War and after the Revolution, is boldly photographed and put upon the stage; while the prologue, which takes place in the future, shows the Czech nation, having come to grief through the wickedness of her politicians, appealing to its patron saint, St Vaclav.
In spite of a certain amount of verbosity and intellectual snobbishness the play was an interesting proof of what can be done with such a large theme.
These two plays, The Land of Many Names and The Upheaval, are the only significant Czech plays that have emerged from a season flooded with foreign classics. The fact that they both belong to the Expressionist school may mean that the renascent Czech drama will tend to follow that direction. In that case the Czech dramatist will not be at a loss for good material near at hand. The problems are many. Czecho-Slovakia is a small nation that has gained its national freedom through the force of exterior circumstances; a small nation attempting to build a political structure that will consolidate that freedom. It is a small nation eager to take its place in the sun and perhaps almost losing its soul in the process. Its people seem condemned by some compelling external force to ape the despised vulgarity of the greater nations. They contain within themselves the seed of a new bourgeoisie that may take the place of the old aristocratic Austria of which they were
