Unlike many other plays by Čapek, 'The White Plague' is pervaded not by hope with a little nihilism, but with anguish and fear for what the future would hold. Written in the late 1930s, shortly before the Munich Agreement delivered much of Czechoslovakia into Nazi control, 'The White Plague' tells the story of a dictatorship which is overcome by an illness it is powerless to control. It was first performed in 1937.