The Insect Play opens in the woods where a drunken tramp sleeps on the ground. Butterflies flit near him. His slumber is interrupted by a lepidopterist who is collecting butterflies for his scientific collection, but naughty tramp scares them away. The scientist buzzes off and the tramp then launches into a spiel bemoaning singleton life.
Somewhere in amongst the invertebrates and undesirables is a play about 1920s Czechoslovakia. The butterflies represent the feel-good flappers of the younger 20s generation. The Trinity Players capture their intelligence well, and Sam Losey’s flirtatious waspishness is noteworthy. Felix (Andrew Smith), the lepidopter poet who makes up for his lacking experience with eager Romantic masochism, is equally proficient.
Michael Hanbury-Williams delights as the paternally over-protective head of the family, while Emma Carrington-Brook’s Mrs. Cricket is his pleasingly neurotic wife, a cliché paralleled effectively by Hannah Cox, who, after much method-acting, is convincing as a comic dung-beetle in search of her pile. The ant scene, however, still bugs me a bit: the actors’ line-pacing certainly needs polishing to match the flow of the earlier butterfly scenes. But aside from this flaw, the scene’s depiction of a communist ant army – with rich Russian accents – is a comic and enjoyable episode.
Alex Gilmore, as the chief inventor of the Russian ant-army, deserves recognition for the unsettling aura of menace he brings to the part. Harry Richards should be picked out too, playing the lone human, and central character, of the tramp. His sardonic and gently inebriated lines focus the play, providing the philosophical framework through which the audience can see not simply novel insect characters but the antenna’d avatars of human stereotypes. The empathy he builds up with the audience is also important in preventingThe Insect Play from lapsing into some kind of critical human dissection. Though the brothers Capeks’ message can sometimes come across as superficial, you get the feeling that they want you to enjoy life, whatever your social situation or personal take upon it.
The cast is promising, the play is interesting and overall it should be a good show. If enjoyment of life is indeed one of the conclusions to be drawn from this satire, I’m certainly buzzing in anticipation to see this production of The Insect Play on Trinity’s pleasant, insecticided lawns.
