The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Prague Letter (Wadsworth)
PRAGUE LETTER
LIVING here, right at the centre of Europe, is to feel as though one were lying on the ground, ear pressed to the earth, listening to the slow rumbling which announces the crash of the social structure, and feeling the heavy waves of disintegration which threaten European culture, a disintegration which began in the nineteenth century with Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg, reaching its highest point during the World War.
But while such writers as Oswald Spengler have made a scientific analysis of this decadence, others have firmly believed that the European soul-sickness is only a transitional phase, an inevitable phase between war and peace. They refuse to read the writing on the wall; unwilling to believe in a passing of our slowly-gathered culture. They resolutely affirm their belief in the spiritual goodness in man, attempting, where possible, to salvage what remains of that traditional culture.
On the other hand there are writers who seem to follow no traditional path; writers who do not wish to conserve the past. They step out into the future with nothing more to guide them than a simple faith in life. This faith, clear-running as a brook, is the secret of the success of the dramas by the two brothers, Karel and Joseph Capek.
Karel Capek is the author of The Robber, R. U. R., The Macropolus Affair; Joseph Capek collaborated with his brother in The World We Live In, and is also the author of The Land of Many Names, a new play produced this month.
The “Expressionist” drama is a product of post-war conditions in Germany. It grew out of the common mood that accompanied the various revolutions and revolts that took place in the Teutonic countries, bringing the masses and the barricades on to the stage. It deals almost exclusively with man as a social and a political animal, although at times the individual soul stalks nakedly through the general disorder. But in the main it concerns itself with the social organism, while the “Collective-Expressionist” 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 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 part. All these questions, and many more, are lying ready to hand for the Czech dramatist as subjects for large treatment and courageous handling, and we may therefore expect to find a special form of the Expressionist drama growing and flourishing side by side with the advance of the new republic.
In our producers and theatrical designers we are fairly fortunate in Prague. At the National Theatre there is Dr K. H. Hilar, Jaroslav Kvapil and Karel Capek at the Vinohrady Theatre, and Jan Bor at the Svandova Intime Theatre.
Dr Hilar is an ambitious producer with one eye on Reinhardt and the other on the limited possibilities of the National Theatre stage. He produced The World We Live In; and I hear he is to produce either Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill very soon.
Jaroslav Kvapil, on the other hand, is a Shakespeare specialist. He has been producing Shakespeare for almost a quarter of a century. This season he has given three beautiful productions: Twelfth Night, Cymbeline, and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream.
Jan Bor has the credit of introducing Franz Werfel’s mysterious play, Bocksgesang, to the Czech stage. This play will be seen in New York next season.
We have half-a-dozen competent scenic designers who are kept well occupied owing to the extremely large number of plays which are produced every year, Joseph Capek, Vlastislav Hofman, Bedrich Feurstein, Joseph Wenig, J. M. Gottlieb, and C. O. Jandl. The first three design for all the modern plays, and the latter three for the ordinary type of stage play.
Joseph Capek’s finest achievement this season was his setting for Shelley’s tragedy, The Cenci, which was produced by his brother, Karel Capek. Dark sombre curtains and three blood-red cubed pillars which were used in all the scenes, the Cenci Palace, the Vatican, and the Castle of Petrella, becoming the symbols of the bloody tragedy. The setting for Calderon’s romantic tragedy, Life Is a Dream, designed by Joseph Wenig, was a series of painted arches stretching back into the distance like a tunnel in an underground railway. If I had space I would describe some of the beautiful designs which Hofman is exhibiting at the moment at one of the exhibitions. Hofman is perhaps the most interesting and live artist in this sphere.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1938, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 85 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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