Rhapsody in Stephen's Green/The Insect Play Read online

  Karel Čapek was the first Czech author since Comenius to achieve a reputation outside his own country, largely due to his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), within five years translated into German, Slovenian, Hungarian, English, Japanese, French, and Russian.10 R.U.R., translated by Selver, opened in London in April 1923, for 126 performances, adding a concept and a word — robot — to the English language. Čapek’s play imagines the invention of ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ (the phrase is in English in the Czech original), who take over most of the world’s work, but eventually rebel and destroy their human masters. Many later works of science fiction have repeated Čapek’s apocalyptic vision of man destroyed by his own machines. But Čapek made a subtler point. His robots rebel when they have been made so human as to think and feel, and recognize their own status as slaves. Čapek’s real target was the dehumanization of human workers in the new world of assembly lines and efficiency experts. At about the time he wrote, Henry Ford’s autobiography, H.N. Casson’s Axioms of Business, and several similar works advocating ‘efficiency’ appeared in Czech translation, among them Principles of Scientific Management (1911; Základy védeckého vedeni, Prague 1925) by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), the inventor of the time-motion study. Taylor’s ideas are parodied in R.U.R. and again in Act III of Rhapsody.11

  The chief source for The Insect Play, as Karel Čapek acknowledged, was La vie des insectes (1910), extracts from the ten-volume Souvenirs entomologiques (1879–1907) by the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915). Fabre describes the activities of various insects, including those who figure in the play, in language that continually invites us to compare them with humans:

  Once his ball is ready, a dung-beetle issues from the crowd and leaves the work-yard, pushing his spoil behind him. A neighbour, one of the newcomers, whose own task is hardly begun, suddenly drops his work and runs to the ball now rolling, to lend a hand to the lucky owner, who seems to accept the proffered aid kindly. Henceforth, the two cronies work as partners. Each does his best to push the pellet to a place of safety. Was a compact really concluded in the workyard, a tacit agreement to share the cake between them? … The eager fellow-worker, under the deceitful pretence of lending a helpful hand, nurses the scheme of purloining the ball at the first opportunity … I ask myself in vain what Proudhon introduced into Beetle-morality the daring paradox that ‘property is based on plunder’, or what diplomatist taught Dung-beetles the savage maxim that ‘might is right’.12

  Myles’s explicit reference to St Stephen’s Green emphasizes his intention to localize the play in Dublin, to make it Irish and his own. The freedom with which he treated the Čapeks’ text, at times ignoring it completely, resembles his sometimes parodic, sometimes creative, use of the Old Irish Buile Suibhne in At Swim-Two-Birds.

  The Čapek Brothers published a ‘comedy in three acts, with prologue and epilogue’. In their Prologue, a Pedant who collects butterflies encounters a Tramp who soliloquizes, partly in blank verse. The Tramp suffers from some metaphysical sorrow. He has fought in the Great War, and emerged, if not shell-shocked, disillusioned. A man, but also Man, he meditates aloud on the Pedant’s claim that Nature is eternal mating. Myles’s Scene 1 eliminates the Pedant, and is a little Dublin vignette of bullying, official, social, and linguistic, as a Grounds Keeper with a strong Dublin accent aggressively clears St Stephen’s Green at closing time. He is intimidated by a well-dressed lounger who claims — in a ‘very “cultured”’ accent — to be an important official, threatens retaliation, and reduces the Keeper to abject pleading. The Tramp, with an even more pronounced Dublin accent, appears only at the end of the Prologue, commenting on the presence of bees. Myles’s Prologue has little to do with the rest of the play, apart from introducing the Tramp and clearing Stephen’s Green of all but one of its human inhabitants.

  The Čapeks’ Act I is about butterflies. Myles’s is about bees. The Čapek butterflies are bright young things, children of the jazz age, the females literally flappers. Bored, languid, promiscuous, they haunt an elegant little cocktail-bar, where the timid and yearning Felix (Gielgud’s 1923 role) pursues Iris (Apatura iris, the purple emperor) with sentimental verses, but fails to recognize her sexual eagerness. Myles’s bees are even more enervated, and discuss suicide in Trinity accents. A Drone recites passages from Shakespeare, the closest Myles gets to Felix’s poetic effusions. The Queen Bee seeks in vain to mate. The Tramp is stung.

  Myles follows the Čapeks — or rather, their English translator — a little more closely in Acts II and III. But where the Čapeks introduce a moth Chrysalis eager to be born, Myles gives us a hen’s talking Egg. The Čapeks’ Ichneumon Fly (Ichneumonidae) and its Larva become a Duck and Duckling. Myles retains the Brothers’ Dung-beetles, male and female, giving them ‘appalling’ Dublin accents and more strongly emphasizing their greedy petty capitalism. He also retains their Crickets, here with Cork accents. The Beetles’ preoccupation with their ball of dung, and the Crickets’ preoccupation with her pregnancy and their search for a new house, are repeated in Myles’s text, though putting Mr Cricket ‘in de [Civil] service’ is his addition. He also retains the Parasite, who agrees with everyone; ‘the last word in mealy-mouthed joxers’, he may owe something to Sean O’Casey’s ‘Joxer’ Daly.

  In Act III, Myles’s chief innovation is to make some Ants Northern Unionists, who speak with strong Belfast accents. They are determined to defend their ‘holy ralugion’ against the ‘dirty Green Awnts’ of the South, who obey ‘thon awnt over in Rome’ and force ‘the wee awnts’ to learn Latin, ‘a dad longuage’. Myles keeps the Čapeks’ satire against assembly lines and efficiency experts, and ends the act, as they do, with a savage war — in which red or British ants also attack the Unionists. When the Red Ant demands military assistance and supplies from the Orange Ants, Myles is hinting to his audience that the British were making similar demands on the Irish government. The Orange Ants’ refusal provokes an invasion by Red and Green Ants in alliance — a reversal of the real possibility in 1943, Ireland’s well-founded fear of a British invasion, which would have included Northern Irish units. Myles was able to get this past the vigilant censors, perhaps because of its sheer audacity — to end with a thinly disguised Eamon de Valera, master of all he survives, proclaiming himself Emperor of the World in Irish. As in the Čapek original, the Tramp, disgusted by the triumphant Emperor, crushes him.

  ‘Gob, I never seen so many children’, Myles’s final line, acknowledges without endorsing the ‘life goes on’ theme of the Capeks’ sentimental epilogue. In Myles’s epilogue, the theme is a general indifference to the Tramp’s death. The children we see, and those the courting couple plan to have, offer little reason for optimism.

  Despite Myles’s popularity and verbal ingenuity, The Insect Play was not a great success at the Gaiety, playing only for a week. Though the playwright came to believe that some sort of conspiracy had been mounted against him, perhaps because his satire seemed aimed at specific individuals,13 reviewers for his own paper and for the Irish Independent were enthusiastic. The unsigned Irish Times review (probably by Brinsley MacNamara) noted that Myles ‘has taken away a good deal from the version through which we had come to know’ the play, ‘and added a great deal that is his own … he makes it rather more of an entertainment.’ But the ‘depths’ are still there, and the target, human selfishness and pride, is Swift’s target: ‘Swift’s version of Lilliput is not so very different from what the sleeping tramp … sees in Stephen’s Green.’ The Irish Times recognized in the Tramp the ‘Chorus who represents us’, and approved the local setting:

  There was a familiarity … about some of the bees, beetles, crickets, ducks and ants that left us in no doubt of the part of the world we were looking at through the eyes of the Tramp. There were moments when they brought us quite close to topics of the day, when we were as near to certain things as some of those things now are to Stephen’s Green.14

  The Irish Independent w
as even more enthusiastic (‘an enjoyable satire’), especially about the local setting, seeing ‘no artistic reason’ to prefer Prague over Dublin, ‘or why the tramp should not speak in the adenoidal whine of Dublin and in its breezy, if adjectively limited, vernacular … With the social satire cleverly adapted to our own problems I feel we saw the play as the brothers Capek would have like their own nationalists to see it.’15

  Joseph Holloway, usually so difficult to please, was nearing the end of his long career as a Dublin playgoer — he died in March 1944. Holloway was present as usual on opening night. ‘Loud applause followed the fall of the curtain,’ he noted, ‘but I fear Myles had strayed miles away from the Čapeks’ play and its import. As we saw it … it was just a pointless burlesque in Irish dialect over-emphasized to the point of grotesque exaggeration.’ Holloway liked MacLiammóir’s costumes, the bees, and the mechanical movements of the ants, which he compared to those of the animated cartoons featuring Felix the Cat. But he condemned Myles’s demotic language:

  The adaptor had turned the play into Stage-Irish dialect, of many counties, and introduced far too many ‘bloodies’ and ‘Ah gods’ into his text. Much of the talk reminded me of the good old red-nosed [word illegible] apelike music hall Irish cross-talkers of long ago! I am sure that the play is interesting and often touching in the original form. As we saw it at the Gaiety it was a thing of sheer burlesque and in the ants scene the Irish were held up to ridicule in cruelly crude fashion, though the scene was wonderfully conveyed … and the warring among the ants cleverly done.16

  A few days later, Holloway complained again about the frequent appearance of the word ‘bloody’, quoting the Gate actor Michael J. Dolan, who had told Myles ‘that the repeated use of the word only shewed the poverty of his expression’, and adding, ‘I heard that his adaptation of The Insect Play was a flop at the Gaiety. His stage efforts are distinctly vulgar and common, and not suitable in the Gaiety, the Abbey, or the Gate.’17

  T.W. of the Irish Press was even less complimentary, giving the play a dismissive ‘interesting’, but then moving to the attack: ‘I am still wondering if William Shakespeare, the Czech brothers Čapek, and Myles na gCopaleen, with a dash of Jimmy O’Dea and Harry O’Donovan, is a digestible dish.’ T.W. noted Myles’s ‘remarkable and close intimacy with the vernacular of the public hostelries of this ancient capital,’ wondered why people laughed at the word ‘bloody,’ and defended the Čapeks against their adaptor: ‘an author who depends on phony bravado like this is offering a poor substitute for drama.’ The Čapeks, he insisted,

  wrote a serious satire on the cruelties of the world … They would have been surprised to find their cornerstone being used … to burlesque the divisions in this country to make a theatrical holiday.

  The Čapeks, lovers of their country, would have been amazed to find their translator and adaptor using their work to mock the movement for reviving a national language and to sneer at the people of Ireland, North and South.

  Other parts of the play were in extremely bad taste; cheap jokes about motherhood are not worthy of any civilization.18

  Writing in the Catholic Standard, Gabriel Fallon made similar objections to the play’s ‘expletives’, provoking Myles into calling him ‘a wretched pedant’.19

  The stiffness of the Irish Press review suggests a possible paying off of scores for the satire of An Béal Bocht. The Press was the property of Eamon de Valera, then Taoiseach and easily recognizable as the Irish-speaking leader of the Green Ants. The paper was the organ of the Fianna Fáil party, self-anointed as the guardian of the national language and the national identity. Though the reviewer apparently had some knowledge of the Čapeks’ work, he seems to take their play too seriously. A similarity between human and insect life was hardly a new idea in Dublin — the King of Brobdingnag ‘was amazed how so impotent and groveling an insect’ as Gulliver could be so ‘inhuman’ and bloodthirsty as to advocate the manufacture and use of gun powder.

  Myles’s Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green neither betrays nor misuses its Czech source. It is essentially a new work, local rather than ostentatiously universal, but local as Ulysses is local, able to include a broad range of human behaviour. Though the Čapeks left it to the director to decide whether the characters would be people acting like insects, or insects acting like people,20 Myles is more decisive. He is bleaker, more pitiless. His humans are insects. Beckett’s tramps wait in the wings. Myles’s bracing Swiftian scorn leaves no room for optimism — except that the scorn is so presented as to provoke laughter, and laughter can be redemptive.

  ROBERT TRACY

  Berkeley, California

  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

  1 See Anne Clissman, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writings (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 22–3; 260–63; and Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton, 1989), 135–6. Act I was published in the Journal of Irish Literature 3:1 (January 1974), 24–39. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green was Myles’s working title, and the play was so announced until just before opening night, when it was re-christened The Insect Play, the usual English title of the Čapeks’ play.

  2 O’Nolan, O Nualláin on Civil Service lists, served in Dublin in the Department of Local Government (1935–54). In 1937–43 ne was Private Secretary to several successive Ministers of Local Government.

  3 See Myles na gCopaleen, The Best of Myles: A Selection from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, ed. Kevin O’Nolan (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), 202, 203, 219, 212.

  4 Myles na gCopaleen, Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn, ed. Kevin O’Nolan (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976), 137; 95.

  5 Flann O’Brien, Stories and Plays (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973), 81–89.

  6 Joseph Holloway, Manuscript Diaries, National Library of Ireland, MSS 2009, 163. For Kavanagh’s comment, see Cronin, 165.

  7 ‘The authors know that their comedy, From the Life of the Insect World, is not a real play, a formal play … it is rather a compilation, consisting of three or four one act plays … They are somewhat connected by the figure of the Tramp…’ Karel Čapek, ‘Poznámky k Zivotu hmyzu: Před premiérou v Narodním divadle’ (Notes on Life of the Insects: Before Opening Night at the National Theatrez, Jeviště (Stage) 3 (1922); reprinted in Karel Čapek, Spisy 18: O umenia kulture (On Art and Culture) 2: 398 (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1985).

  8 See Karel Čapek and Josef Čapek, Ze spolecné tvorby (From the Col lected Works), Spisy (Writings) (Praha: Československy spisovatel, 1982), 2: 403.

  9 Davis’s version is in Twenty Best European Plays on the American Stage, ed. John Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), 597–695; it was also published by Samuel French (1933). The Selver-Playfair-Bax version appeared in 1923 (Oxford University Press). Server’s more accurate translation is in International Modern Plays (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1950).

  10 Boris Mědílek a kolektiv, Bibliografie Karla Čapka (Praha: Academia, 1990), 466–533.

  11 When 2nd Engineer finds ‘a new way of mackin’ them wurk quacker’, by speeding up the count. Čapek notes the presence of ‘the idea of Taylorism’ (mystenku taylorismu) in ‘Poznámky k Zivotu hmyzu’, Spisy 18: 397.

  12 Fabre, Jean-Henry, The Life and Love of the Insect, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London: A. and C. Black, 1911), 8–11. Karel Čapek acknowledges his debt to Fabre in ‘Poznámky k Zivotu hmyzu, Spisy 18: 397.

  13 Cronin, 135; Peter Costello and Peter Van de Camp, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), 82.

  14 The Irish Times 22 March 1943: 3. For MacNamara’s authorship, see Costello/Van de Camp 82.

  15 Irish Independent 23 March 1943: 6.

  16 Holloway, Manuscript Diaries, National Library of Ireland, MSS 2009, 519–20.

  17 Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Dixon, California: Proscenium Press, 1970), 3 (1938–1944), 86.

  18
Irish Press 23 March 1943: p. 3 col. 4.

  19 Further Cuttings 169. Myles and Fallon exchanged shots in The Standard (2 April 1943). S.M. Dunn may be another mask for the playwright:

  Our Theatre Critic Attacked and Defended

  Letter from Myles na gCopaleen:

  Dear Sir,—Last week you were good enough to publish an article by Gabriel Fallon in which it was suggested that myself and about 150 other people were engaged in presenting obscenities and salacities on the Dublin stage. I must, therefore, ask you to publish this letter.

  Myself and the other people concerned are content to endure the implication that as Christians and Catholics we are very inferior to Mr. Fallon. We claim, however, a sense of aesthetic delicacy, and we protest very strongly against a dirty tirade which, under the guise of dramatic criticism, was nothing more or less than a treatise on dung. ‘There will always be a distinction,’ Mr. Fallon says, ‘between the honest dung of the farmyard and the nasty dirt of the chicken run.’ Personally I lack the latrine erudition to comment on this extraordinary statement, and I am not going to speculate on the odd researches that led your contributor to his great discovery. I am content to record my objection that his faecal reveries should be published.

  This second point I want to make clear to your readers is that there is no foundation whatsoever for Mr. Fallon’s statements that the ‘Insect Play’ abounded in obscenity, filthy language, and gibes at sacred things. The three things mentioned specifically by Mr. Fallon are sex, motherhood, and double entendre. There is no reference to sex as such anywhere; it is true that there are male and female characters, but very few people nowadays consider that alone an indelicacy. There is a pathetic and beautiful passage where a cricket who is going to have a baby is murdered; as a modest part-author I am in position to call this pathetic and beautiful because the scene is Čapek verbatim. Your wretched pedant has never read or seen Čapek’s play. As to double entendre, there is not a single example of this objectionable music-hall device in the piece from first to last. The entire play is a salutary double entendre and may well present to the mentally adolescent the same sort of shock that was given by the Rouault picture [of Christ], which was denounced as blasphemous by many responsible persons and is now housed in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. That your Mr. Fallon is not even educated is evident from the extraordinary stuff he publishes in your paper every week. In the article in question, for instance, with the phraseen gamin de genie, he affords your readers a glimpse of the tired European who is not quite at home in English; this impression is more than strengthened when we find the master using the word ‘adaption’ — twice, unfortunately, thus letting out the scapegoat printer. I cannot find ‘adaption’ in any dictionary. It must be French, I suppose.