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| Josef won a considerable reputation as a painter of the Cubist school, later developing his own playful primitive style. He collaborated with his brother in composing sketches, stories, plays, as well as writing two short novels of his own and critical essays in which he defended the art of the unconscious, of children and of savages. Following Hitler's invasion of 1939, Josef Capek was sent to a German concentration camp. He died at Belsen in April 1945.
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| Karel Capek became a journalist and for a time stage manager of the theatre in Vinohrady. Though a writer of novels, visionary romances, travel books, stories, and essays, Karel is best known for his plays. The Insect Play took the world by storm and was performed to great acclaim in London and New York. This pessimistic allegory of man's rapaciousness and stupidity, as duplicated in the insect world, is as neatly contrived as it is uncomfortably true. His last plays, written just before the entry of Hitler into Czechoslovakia, deal with the rise of dictatorship and the terrible consequences of war. Karel Capek died on Christmas Day, 1938. |
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| Summer time, a man, an everyman walking in the park, rushing past him a lepidopterist chasing butterflies he wants to catch them, pin them, keep them. Why thinks the everyman, watching the butterflies flutter around listening as the butterflies beating wings gives way to speech, speech every man can understand. So everyman enters the insect world, a world which is our world in miniature. The butterflies show us, the flighty and fickle nature of young love.
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| Next crawling by a pair of beetles confirms the need for a solid base, a home. Above them a chrysalis is slowly evolving, yearning to live. The everyman watches, talks, laughs and learns as the different insects illuminate our lives. A pair of crickets illustrates nest building and the beginnings of family life. We are shown the extremes of that life by the ichneumon fly and his ever hungry daughter. |
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Then the ants that come to rule for their colour come to stop all ideas, beliefs and faiths outside their own. Everyman must stop this. Finally at nightfall the chrysalis bursts into life, at that moment over come with the weight and brevity of what he has seen everyman slips into an eternal sleep, his requiem delivered by two passing snails. So the park returns to silence, except for the occasional crickets chirp.
So life goes on. |
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| Thanks to our Director Kate Scott, the Producer Joe Wright, and all the many other people who worked so hard to make this play a great success. |
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