BBC Radio 4 Extra is currently broadcasting a new radio dramatization of Karel Capek’s War With the Newts. You can listen to it on demand, for free, for the rest of this week, here.
In the theater, Capek’s known for his social-satire fantasy classic R.U.R. (for which the playwright coined the now-standard term “robot”) and The Insect Play.
I’ve seen both these plays done by small theaters in New Haven—R.U.R. by Michael Colavolpe’s TheatreMania company sometime in the 1990s and Insect Play smartly adapted by Steve Bellwood for the Jackdaw Pike troupe sometime in the 2000s. I also have powerful memories of a lush, stinging production of Insect Play directed by Laurence Senelick over 40 years ago at Tufts University.
Capek sticks with you a while. He was so ahead of his time that it seems impossible that he’s now been dead for over 70 years. Outspoken and progressive, he was an early member of International PEN and served Czechoslavakia as a political journalist and speechwriter.
His theater legacy is one thing—even if Capek hadn’t written those allegorical fantasies he’d be revered for his bold anti-fascist dramas The Mother and White Disease (aka Power and Glory) which spoke up against the insurgent Nazi party in the 1930s.
But he’s got a whole other literary reputation: as a novelist, a spinner of folktales, a travel writer and a short story writer with a knack for mysteries.
Science fiction fans know Karel Capek as one of the pioneers of that genre, thanks largely due to War With the Newts, which was kind of the Planet of the Apes of its time. The book isn’t easily stageable, due to the amphibians it requires (though I guess that didn’t stop Albee from writing Seascape). But it makes for a dandy large-cast radio suspense drama. The BBC production scurries as swiftly as one of its titular salamanders, but also pauses to make sure you realize this is a metaphor for how the world felt and behaved in the years leading up to World War Two.
Several Capek plays are ripe for revival, and several of his novels and story collections scream out for adaptations. Hint, hint.