Čapek, Karel

Čapek, Karel (1890–1938), Czech playwright, whose first play The Brigand (1920) was produced at the National Theatre in Prague. With his next play, RUR (1921)—the initials stand for Rossum's Universal Robots—Čapek became widely known outside Czechoslovakia and was responsible for adding the word ‘robot’ to the English language. The Insect Play (1922), like RUR, was much influenced by German Expressionism and employed the techniques of revue; both plays depict the horrors of a regimented technological world and the terrible end of the populace if they fail to rise against their oppressors. The Insect Play, written by Karel in collaboration with his brother Josef (1887–1945), an artist who died of typhus in Belsen, was immediately seen in London with the subtitle And So Ad Infinitum and in New York as The World We Live In. The Makropulos Affair (1923), on which Janáček based his 1926 opera, argues the case for longevity and decides against it. A sequel to RUR, Adam the Creator (1927), again written jointly with Josef, shows man endeavouring to rebuild the world destroyed by the robots; and two anti-Fascist plays, The White Scourge (1937), seen in London as Power and Glory in 1938, and The Mother (1938; London, 1939), deal with the rise of dictatorship and the devastating effects of war. All Čapek's plays reflect the world he lived in and comment on its grosser follies. He also wrote an amusing short monograph, How a Play is Produced.