Insect Play
| Pictures from the Insects' Life | |
|---|---|
| Written by |
Karel Čapek Josef Čapek |
| Date premiered | 1922 |
| Original language | Czech |
| Genre | satire |
Pictures from the Insects' Life (in Czech: Ze života hmyzu) – also known as The Insect Play, The Life of the Insects, The Insect Comedy, The World We Live In and From Insect Life – is a satirical play that was written in the Czech language by the brothers Karel Čapek and Josef Čapek, who collaborated on some 20 stage works, of which this is the most famous. It was published in 1921 and premiered in 1922.
In the play, a tramp/narrator falls asleep in the woods and dreams of observing a range of insects that stand in for various human characteristics in terms of their lifestyle and morality: the flighty, vain butterfly, the obsequious, self-serving dung beetle, the ants, whose increasingly mechanized behaviour leads to a militaristic society. The anthropomorphized insects allow the writers to comment allegorically on life in post-World War I Czechoslovakia.
The first English version of the play was The Insect Play or And So Ad Infinitium, translated by Paul Selver, and adapted by Nigel Playfair and Clifford Bax published in 1923. Another English version of Selver's text was "The World We Live In" by Owen Davis in 1933; both of these adaptations are incomplete. Act II of the play was translated by Robert T. Jones and Tatiana Firkušnỷ in 1990 for the book Towards the Radical Center:A Karel Čapek Reader. Peter Majer and Cathy Porter published a complete English translation, titled The Insect Play for Methuen Drama in 1999.
The play premiered in 1922 at the National Theatre in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Successful American (1922) and British (5 May 1923) premieres followed. BBC Television has presented the play three times, to varying critical response: first 30 May 1939, in a production by Stephen Thomas; then 28 May 1950 (Selver translation adapted and produced by Michael Barry, with Bernard Miles as the tramp); then 19 June 1960 directed by Hal Burton. It was adapted for radio by Ian Cotterell and broadcast on 1 Sep 1975 on the BBC Home Service.
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