Went to see the Vaněk Plays, Audience, Protest and Private View, in productions by the European Stage Company at the Realistic Theatre. The Theatre is just off Námesti Sovětskÿch Tankistu1, a large monument to the Russian War Dead. Jitka’s child, Bobo, plays with a plastic tank. In the windows of the bookshops and foodshops there are photocopied A4 posters SRPEN 21, 19682 with photographs of tanks driving down streets full of rubble and broken barricades.
The plays were in the translations done by Vera Blackwellová who seems to have translated most of Havel’s output. They were good, natural translations. I don’t know whether there is a Pinter influence on Vera or Václav.
The most interesting of the plays was Protest which was morally fascinating3. The character of the self-pitying writer was less stereotypic than that of the drunken head maltster (a word I kept mishearing as monster) and the aspirant or rather the achieved Czech couple.
I was very surprised to discover that Private View wasn’t written later than the other two plays and that it was written as early as 1975. It had been produced as a satire on Americanized, yuppified, New Agers.
Signs of Millennialism in the audience as well, a woman wearing what looked like an orange judo suit with a hood, and a white skirt. I overheard her saying that this was her uniform as a meditation teacher and that she ‘had taken certain vows to enable her to wear it’. American. I can’t take these mutated religions seriously.
The Ferdinand Vaněk character seemed, at times, too spongelike, too non-judgemental to have an independent existence. Cipher. The chorus in ‘Henry V’. Pavel Kohout’s essay ‘The chaste centaur’ is very perceptive about Vaněk’s unwittingly provocatory character4.
Notes:
During one of my last classes one of my students asked me why I thought Communism had failed. I said that I had come to think it had failed because it overestimated the goodness of the individual, the individual’s capacity for altruistic behaviour. The whole class totally disagreed – communism overestimated the badness of the individual, their capacity for perpetual corruption, self-degradation, self-abnegation. I agreed with them. That is what late-communism, communism after Stalin, or rather Stalinism believed. but I also said that Marx believed in the essential goodness of human-beings and that his teachings had been corrupted. I now think that the simple difference between the two is this; Marx was a political theorist, Stalin was a politician.
Soviet Tank Square. Later renamed as Náměstí Kinských. And featuring a real tank on a raised plinth. This will become known as ‘the Pink Tank’ after, over the course of April and May 1991, it is repeatedly painted pink. First by David Černý (an art student) and his friends ‘the Neostunners,’ protesting at its continued invasive presence in Praha, and then by members of the Czechoslovak parliament, protesting at Černý’s arrest for ‘hooliganism’. The MPs were themselves immune from prosecution. The tank is no longer in the square.
August 21, 1968 — the date the invading Soviet tanks arrived in Praha.
Quite a few other writers have written their own Vaněk plays. Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovsky, Jiri Dienstbier, Tom Stoppard and Edward Einhorn. I love these plays. I’m thinking of writing a sequel.
It’s in Václav Havel: or Living in Truth, Faber, 1987.