The Insect Play

The Insect Play, by the brothers Capek, is showing this week at the Old Fire Station Studio Theatre. It is a distinctly unusual play, concerning as it does a tramp (simply billed as "Tramp", and played by Iain Drennan), who finds himself amongst a world of anthropomorphosised insects. Whether this is reality, dream, or hallucination is distinctly ambiguous, and largely irrelevant. The Tramp watches the peculiar behaviours of the insects, and muses about the differences (or lack thereof) between these creatures and the "Lords of Creation," Mankind.

The play makes the wise choice of using stylised, symbolic representations for the insects, rather than attempting to produce a realistic flea costume. So we have butterflies in tailcoats and cravats, dung beetles in battered hats and fingerless gloves, and a sleek Ichneumon Fly with a leather coat and handgun. The Crickets, of course, wear cricket whites. The visual style of the production is bold, striking, and remarkably effective. Gigantic blades of bright green grass and primary-colour costumes create an extremely convincing impression of insects going about their insecty business.

The cast is reasonably large, and the cast of characters considerably larger. Most of the actors play at least two roles, with virtually everybody putting in an appearance in the vast army of red ants in the final act. This of course makes it virtually impossible to single out any individual performance. Drennan, as the Tramp, is obviously in the focal role, but mention should also be made of Ted Hodgkinson's gloriously melancholy butterfly Felix, and Thew Jones' murderously sinister Ichneumon Fly. Although these two spring to mind at once, there isn't a bad performance in the group, and the entire cast does superbly.

You could probably work this out for yourself, but The Insect Play isn't really about insects. The various species are fairly obviously used to represent different human follies (as evidenced by the Tramp's repeated failure to demonstrate any real differences between Man and the insects). Interestingly, the last group of invertebrates we encounter is an army of Red Ants, who toil ceaselessly for the good of their state. Since the play was written in Communist Czechoslovakia, this shouldn't be too surprising, but in this production there also seem to be parallels drawn with certain other modern superpowers. The leader of the army speaks with a strong US accent, and long speeches are made about Democracy and Fighting War for Peace. In this last section, in fact, I rather feel that the play steps beyond satire, and into out-and-out preaching, indeed the Tramp seems to start speaking in lines from old War poems. (I'm fairly sure that the lines that go something like "…the battle began / Collateral damage, according to plan / And after the battle, he goes out to scan / The mountains of corpses, according to plan" ...that comes from something I've heard before).

Bottom line as ever, is it worth your time and money? Basically I'd say an unreserved yes. It's funny, quirky, and unlike pretty much anything you are likely to have seen before, or are likely to see for some time to come.

Dan Hemmens (DI User), 02/11/05

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The Insect play has three main groups of insects.
The Beetles.
The creepers and crawlers.
The ants.
These insects are given human characters. They make the reader think of his or her society. The butterflies for example are prostitutes, love going for parties etc.
It is a very interesting play.

DEBBIE (Unverified), 07/08/06

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