The world has lost a great leader—Václav Havel, one of the finest political philosophers and humanitarians of the 20th century.
What the world may not realize is that it has also lost a great playwright.
The Czech dissident whose tenacity and courage in the face of Communist rule changed the course of his country, died in December at his summer home in the Bohemian mountains. A world-renowned politician, essayist, human rights activist, humanist and globalist, Václav Havel waged a quiet but determined fight for “the right to write” over two dark decades. He brought about dramatic change. In 1989, he led a grassroots movement called “the Velvet Revolution” that toppled the Russian-controlled Communist regime in a bloodless six weeks, and ushered in a new era not only in his country but also throughout Central and Eastern Europe. He served as president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia—and later, the Czech Republic—until 2003.
The other Václav Havel lost to us—one lesser known, but equally as vital—is Havel the dramatist, author of 11 full-length plays and 7 one-acts, plays that have an important place in the European theatre of the absurd, plays that not only reflect his country’s dramatic course in the second half of the 20th century but also played a unique role in changing it.
Havel never dreamed of becoming a politician. By his own admission, his life story reads like a fairy tale. Born in 1936 into one of the wealthiest families in the land, Havel led a life of privilege, safely sequestered on the family estate in Moravia during World War II, classically educated at a boarding school. He began writing poetry at the age of five; he acted in Greek plays with other affluent schoolmates.
All that ended in 1948, when the Communists took over and confiscated the Havels’ wealth and real estate. As a member of a “bourgeois” non-Communist family, young Václav was forbidden a higher education. But that did not stop him. He became a zealous autodidact, reading translations of Kafka, Beckett and Ionesco smuggled into Czechoslovakia from the West. He formed a literary circle of like-minded 16-year-olds he published a journal, he wrote essays and poetry.
After the army, with no other professional opportunities open to him, he got a job as a stagehand in a tiny “pocket” theatre in Prague called the Balustrade, and his life in the theatre began. In addition to his duties operating the lighting board, he began to write cabarets, and soon his talent was recognized. In 1963 he wrote his first full-length absurdist comedy, The Garden Party, about dehumanized life and loss of individual identity under Communism. It was followed by The Memorandum in 1965 and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (political satires with similar themes) in 1968—by which time Havel was considered the hottest young playwright in the country, and his works began to be performed throughout Europe. In 1968, Joseph Papp, artistic director of the newly created Public Theater in New York, produced The Memorandum in his inaugural season. Havel attended, and won an Obie Award.
Euphoric, Havel returned to Czechoslovakia to greet “Prague Spring” and its promise of a thaw in frigid Communist policies. That hope was soon dashed. In August 1968, the Russian tanks rolled into Prague’s Old Town Square, kidnapped the liberal Czech leader Alexander Dubcek and instituted a new regime of “normalization.” Within 18 months, Havel’s plays, essays and poetry were stripped from libraries and bookstores. The doors of the Theatre on the Balustrade were closed to him. He was banned, or, as the Czechs say, one of the “silenced authors.”
The 1970s, under severe, Soviet-reinforced Communism, were dark years for Havel. Hidden away in his farmhouse in the Bohemian mountains, isolated and depressed, he managed to write two full-length plays—The Conspirators and Mountain Hotel. But no theatre would dare produce his work. So his neighbor Andrej Krob, a former production manager of the Balustrade, formed an amateur company called “Theatre on the Road” and rehearsed a third play Havel wrote that decade—The Beggar’s Opera. Krob and Havel rented a hall and produced it for one night, Nov. 1, 1975, before a brave audience of 300 friends and family, many of whom were later arrested and punished for attending the play of a “silenced author.”
But that didn’t stop Havel. While working in a brewery (the only jobs open to non-Communist writers were blue-collar ones), he wrote a trio of one-act plays called “The Vanek Plays” (Audience, A Private View, Protest), ironic, autobiographical pieces about the plight of a silenced Czech playwright named Vanek. He and Krob performed them in their adjacent barn for an audience of friends, and a tradition of summer theatre of silenced work by Václav Havel was born that would last for decades.
As more and more underground artists were harassed and arrested (including the rock band the Plastic People of the Universe), Havel and his fellow writers knew they had to do something. They wrote a document known as Charter 77, protesting the violation of human rights according to the Helsinki Agreement, of which Czechoslovakia was a signator. For attempting to deliver this document on Jan. 7, 1977, to the government with its 243 signatures, Havel was arrested and ultimately sentenced to four years in prison (1979–83). Thereafter, he was known as “Václav Havel, dissident.”
It is this chapter of history that would become the most meaningful in Havel’s life in the theatre. No less than three international theatres—the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Orange Tree Theatre in London, and the Public in New York—declared the imprisoned Havel to be their playwright in residence, and pledged to produce all of his banned plays, which had been smuggled out of the country. An unprecedented show of solidarity among international playwrights ensued. Tom Stoppard protested in London, Harold Pinter read Audience on the BBC, and both Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller wrote plays in honor of Havel for the 1982 Avignon Theatre Festival Three other Czech writers borrowed the character of Vanek and wrote their own “Vanek plays.”
Havel was finally released in 1983, and wrote four more full-length plays that decade—Largo Desolato, Temptation, Tomorrow We’ll Start It Up and Redevelopment—between bouts of re-arrests.
And then came 1989. As Communism rotted from within, a coalition had grown among the dissidents, the underground and the students. Then, on Nov. 17, a spontaneous clash between a harmless parade and the police in the Prague streets catapulted into the “Velvet Revolution.” Protestors gathered in the theatre dressing rooms in Prague, and a movement was formed called the Civic Forum Havel was reluctantly elected to lead it; protests swelled to 50,000 nightly in Wenceslas Square calling for Communism’s downfall; the government toppled. Six weeks later, clad in the borrowed clothes of the American ambassador William Luers, Havel was inaugurated as the president of the newly created democratic Czech government. No one was more surprised than he.
As for Havel’s life in the theatre, it didn’t stop there. 1990–92 were the euphoric years of “Havelmania” in Czech theatre, when every play by the playwright/president was performed in Prague and throughout the country. Then the fairy tale ended. The Czech and Slovak states separated in 1992, and Havel was reelected as president of the newly formed Czech Republic in 1993. Thereafter, it was never the same. Political intrigue plagued the Prague Castle, Havel’s beloved wife Olga died, and Havel (an inveterate chain smoker) was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Meanwhile, Havel created Forum 2000, a five-year globalization program headquartered in Prague, whose cast of characters included Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, Elie Wiesel and Shimon Peres, among many other world figures.
Havel spent the last nine years of his life suffering from worsening health, building his library, and writing one more new play. It was aptly called Leaving, another absurdist comedy—this time about a political leader who is, yes, leaving office. With its references to King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, it was his last contribution to the special brand of political theatre of the absurd that bears his unmistakable mark.
The gift of Havel’s life in the theatre lies not in the success of his plays, nor even in their individual merit. It lies in the essence of theatre’s value—what it can mean to a culture, and how it can transform that culture.
What haunts me is the image of Havel dying alone at Hradecek, his farmhouse in the mountains. Once a dissident center teeming with writers and actors, laughter and friendship and
dreams of freedom, later the destination of international figures like Papp and Clinton, the farmhouse was empty on Sunday morning, Dec. 18. Only his second wife and a caregiver were at Havel’s side.
What a loss. Václav Havel is one of the few world leaders of this past traumatic century that one can truly admire without question, a moral compass of our times. I’ll never forget the meetings I had with him for the biography I wrote about his life in the theatre. He spoke in a low, warm voice; his manner was gracious, deferential, self-effacing. Yet there it was, unmistakably—the charisma of one who truly believed, like Anne Frank, in the goodness of humanity and the “power of the powerless” (the name of his greatest political essay). He was a man who fought unflinchingly, selflessly for human rights in his own country and around the world. He was a man of the theatre.
To quote a Czech friend, Lukas Rychetsky: “Godot has not come—Havel has left.”
Carol Rocamora is the author of the biography Acts of Courage: Václav Havel’s Life in the Theater (Smith & Kraus, 2005).
