In his first speech to the Federal Assembly in Prague (25 January 1990), playwright Václav Havel, in his new role as President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, focused on the phenomenon of time:

In my offices in the Prague Castle, I did not find one single clock. To me, that has a symbolic meaning: for long years, there was no reason to look at clocks, because time had stood still. History had come to a halt, not only in the Prague Castle but in the whole country. So much faster does it roll forward now that we have at long last freed ourselves from the paralysing straitjacket of the totalitarian system. Time has speeded up.

As Guillaume Apollinaire notes, in his poem, 'La Zone', 'les aiguilles de l'horloge du quartier juif vont à rebours'. The clock in the Prague Jewish quarter, at the Jewish Town Hall tower, moves backward, as if symbolising—poetically as well as historically—the absurd movement of time: no longer forward, no longer even static, but really moving back. Czech history has moved back a number of times. The dormant and petrified beauty of Prague, a city described by Franz Kafka as the mother with claws, with its backward-moving clock, with its legends of slumbering knights who would return 'when the time is right', made the theme of Time a central feature of Czech philosophical thinking, traceable in the writings of Comenius, Bernard Bolzano, T. G. Masaryk and, more recently, Jan Patocka.

The dramas of president-philosopher Václav Havel contain many elements which relate directly or indirectly to Time, which in Havel's interpretation is primarily an existential category, in the same sense as viewed by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Martin Heidegger. But to Havel, Time is quite a specific entity. It is more tangible and man-related than Heidegger's Time, which has always a metaphysical, abstract dimension, and relates to existence itself, as expressed in the very title of Heidegger's major philosophical work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), published in 1927.

Heidegger's concept of Time, as interpreted by Jan Patocka (in whose clandestine seminars Havel took part when he wasn't serving a prison term), helped Havel survive some depressing times of isolation. In isolation, be it physical or psychological, time slows down. The very private and inward-looking existence forced upon people by a totalitarian regime which inspires fear of meaningful action and interaction, lest the meaning they produce turns out to be subversive, are the stuff from which Havel weaves his slow-moving but inwardly intense drama. He represents a conflict of the individual struggling with events and human relationships stuck in a time warp. His characters struggle to escape from a cobweb of meaningless events which move predictably and tediously in a closed circle. Their struggle seems equally meaningless to those for whom suspended time has become the only tangible reality, in which they know only how to function, and survive. In Havel's plays, individuals struggle with a world which is grinding to a halt, and that threatens to blur any difference between people and to bring human existence to a fossilised end.

This bleak picture is most poignantly illustrated in Havel's play The Mountain Hotel (1976), whose characters meander in circles, repeating phrases which betray nothing of their individuality or any personal thoughts, and which gradually become interchangeable to a point where personal identity no longer matters and communication becomes impossible. No one listens to anyone and no one expects to be listened to. As if they were all a single character, a hydra-like monster speaking through several mouths, they say the same things, becoming a symbol of uniform repetitive thinking. Any yet, at one point, out of the blue and almost out of character, one of the mouths (Drasar) says:

Isn't it time to break the barriers between us? To take off our conventional masks and open up to one another just a little? We may not realise it but time flies, life is short and your sojourn here flows like water—and before you notice, some of you begin to leave, and those who stay behind feel remorse—unfortunately too late—how little they were able to say to those who are now irretrievably gone, how little they were able to let them know that—in spite of everything—they cared and felt something deeper for them—

Milan Uhde, the playwright and now the Czech Minister of Culture, describes the characters in this play. They are

not people with a past, a present, or an identity, with attributes and relationships. They are sloughing all of these off and one wonders if they ever wore them. The only thing that covers them now are their names. Their actions, their status, careers, destinies, feelings, dreams, dialogues, amours, flirtations, peel off their personalities like a label off a bottle. The labels are interchangeable, the content evaporates. Void is all that remains.

This is a reflection of a deformed social reality as Havel perceives it, a society which extols empty slogans and makes them into yardsticks with which to measure non-existence, often masquerading under the banner of bizarre ideological facades.

In this kind of world, one might as well be in prison. Havel was offered a choice between prison and exile. As if to discover for himself the meaning of life separated from time, to clarify, as he calls it, the 'naked values', timeless and eternal, which would give human existence a meaning in any circumstances, any conditions, Havel chose prison. In his letters from prison to his wife, Havel writes:

I think a great deal about the meaning I should give to the prison years which I am facing. Last time, I wrote about the possibility that it might lead—if I manage it well—to an overall psychological and mental reconstruction of myself. Why do I believe that? In recent years, I have lived rather an odd, unnatural, exclusive existence, as if in a glasshouse. That is going to change now. I shall be one of many small and powerless ants. I shall in a sense be returning to the old times, thrown into the world in a similar way I was when I worked as a lab assistant, as a stage-hand, or when I was a soldier or a student. I shall be a mere number, I shall be one of many and no one will expect anything of me or take any special notice of me. For some people outside, I shall probably be an 'institution,' but I shall know nothing about it, I shall live in a different world with different problems. This return to the earlier existential situation—a situation in which I thrived best and in which I also created most—might help me with this inner reconstitution which I spoke about last time (losing my stiffness and lack of self-confidence, stop seeing myself through the eyes of others who expect something from me, give up my nervousness, self-doubt, etc.) One of the specific things I might do is to start writing more for the theatre again—as an observer of 'the theatre of the world' …

Serving time in prison and attempting to reconstruct Time internally helped Havel focus on the deformations of time existing in the world outside. For Havel as a playwright, the static cobweb of Czech totalitarian tedium was the framework within which drama was created by the two clashing concepts of time, with a predictable end: whatever happens, whatever action an individual might take, round in circles he goes. For Havel as a philosopher and politician, the unpredictable and exciting events of November 1989 provided the explosion through which compressed time burst out with speed and confusion, and which required a playwright to take charge. Too many suppressed dramas were now writing themselves out and needed to be harnessed. And an observer cannot escape the impression that, just as Havel the playwright once struggled to speed time up, Havel the statesman may now be struggling, if not to slow time down, then at least to channel the millions of accelerated personal dramas into a coherent dramatic shape.

Focus and purpose, which Havel has been trying to give his confused nation, are to him not merely a philosophical concept, but a specific entity linked to a restoration of individual identity lost in years of meaningless, mechanised, uniform patter and prescribed action. Years in which people could lose their sense of identity to a point when they could end up visiting themselves, like Pludek in The Garden Party (1963).

The threat to identity is real in any political system, so much more so in a totalitarian one. Havel's The Garden Party has two absurd organisations, whose job is to ensure loss of identity: the liquidation department and the commencing service. Between them, they make people blend into each other and gradually liquidate them by making them indistinguishable. Uniformity is the ideal, exceptions are out. When the play's protagonist, Pludek, becomes director of both institutions, even the institutions themselves blend into each other and become indistinguishable. Their activities are an Orwellian pretence, a cover-up of some mysterious activity which is the opposite of what the institutions claim to stand for.

Similarly, The Memorandum (1965) takes us to an unspecified office where scientists are mere officials and administrators pretending to be engaged in scientific experiments, exchanging repetitive meaningless banalities. Havel further foregrounds this pseudo-reality of pretence and camouflage by their concern with an artificial language—'Ptydepe', which destroys universal human values by depriving people of the ability of communicate anything sensible, and by stripping words of their meaning.

In most of his plays, Havel deals with the issue of 'The Inner Lie' and the possibility of dismantling it, be it a self-deception or deception about the world. However, many of his characters simply refuse to find out anything about themselves, to identify who they are. In The Garden Party, Hugo Pludek's father, when asked who exactly he is, replies with dismay: 'I? Who am I? Look. I don't like such one-sided questions. I really don't!'

In their search for identity Havel's heroes get entangled in situations of existential conflict with established social structures. They need to defend their identity, if for no other reason, then at least to come to terms with, and to be able to survive in, a totalitarian society. Those who do not defend their identity often end up like the protagonists of The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), where a conflict occurs when two sets of 'scientists' meet and make each other's work impossible. They are mainly clerks or bureaucrats or scientists from a variety of ephemeral institutes and establishments, who carry out their activity with enthusiasm but without any results. Everything degenerates into personal and sexual relationships between secretaries and bosses, superiors and their staff.

Havel returns to the atmosphere of pseudo-science of his earlier plays in his more recent work, Temptation (1985). Temptation presents a renowned scientist, Dr Foustka, tempted by the devil. Foustka is one of those scientists engaged in unspecified work for an institution with unspecified purpose. His job is to protect and supervise the 'scientificality of science' and guard it against any infiltration by unscientific irrationality. But Foustka dabbles in the esoteric, the occult and the magical, so his encounter with the devil is only a matter of time, and to fall into the devil's, claws means never to be able to get out again. The devil, here, functions as a system from which there is no escape. Foustka's identity has to be defended in conflicts with his boss and colleagues, in an atmosphere of fears and anxiety, seeping through from outside.

The Faustian theme, which Havel knew as early as 1977 (at the inception of Charter 77), had by then acquired a specific Czech significance. In the Czech predicament of that time, the inept and comic devils were personified by interrogators and supervisors. In order not to lose himself, not to betray those he represented or ideals he believed to be true, Havel, like his protagonist, Foustka, had to strive for personal integrity or, in Heidegger's terms, authenticity, truthfulness, and loyalty to one's true self. He had to struggle to preserve his identity in the face of the devil, in the face of temptation by evil. Evil was seen as loss of identity, through collaboration with, or connivance at, the dehumanising machinery of totalitarianism, and was to be fought. Pressure to conform in return for relative comfort had to be resisted. All these became issues of everyday existence, not only for characters in dramas, but also for individuals in Czech society.

In this situation, drama becomes a way of expressing and defining models of existential conflicts resembling simulated situations in experimental psychology. An illustration of a psychological premise in specific human situations is often carried ad absurdum.

The absurdity of totalitarian politics is parodied in Havel's play Conspirators (1970), where general prosecutor Dykl describes the new candidate for the dictator's job, Colonel Moher, with these words: 'Let me be frank. His awful self-confidence scares me. He considers all his decisions automatically correct, however many proofs one may present of his errors. Or take his dreadful implacability. I am an old veteran but I must say that when he described how severely he was going to deal with the students, he scared the daylights out of me. Imagine a situation when practically all power is concentrated in his hands.' Major Ofir replies: 'His measures are, admittedly, often somewhat harsh. But what matters is that his goals are beneficial.' Dykl: 'Forgive me, Major, but history will not judge our intentions but only and solely our deeds. We may repeat a hundred times that we are building a new and more humane world. But what will all this mean when the imprints of our blood-stained hands cry out from every single stone of our glorious edifice.'

Havel makes a direct attempt to decode and identify the absurd features of totalitarian pseudo-government in The Beggars' Opera (1975), linking it with criminality which does not stop short of murder. The city chief in the play is, at the same time, chief of all gangsters. Whoever leads a gang must also report to the police, and the chief of police runs the entire criminal network. He does, to be sure, solve some crimes and prosecute some criminals, but does not forget to use this to enrich himself and strengthen his personal power.

Such a deformed society induces a crisis of awareness of the meaning and purpose of life and the world, and leads to a dissipation of human identity. Man goes on living merely as a robot. Havel's dramas, in his own view, carry the dissipation of identity into 'a dismemberment of the dramatic character, suspension of time and absence of a coherent story on which an identity of a character could assert itself. Time loses its human dimension, comes to a halt or runs around in a circle.' Events do not connect or relate to each other any more, and are not heading towards a solution or conclusion. Man, instead of being their creator, becomes their powerless victim. In the dismemberment of the storyline into disconnected elements which do not match, traditional drama, as a sequence of time, disappears. It becomes, as it has in Havel's plays, a psychodrama—a conflict of psychological states rather than real characters.

Havel's early plays, such as The Garden Party, The Memorandum, and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, can be seen as an updated illustration of Existentialist philosophy, a philosophy of a man on the run. Havel's Existentialism, however, is returning to humanism steeped in a passionate desire to make sense out of absurdity. The running man will soon have nowhere left to run, he has to seek certainty within himself by reclaiming and accepting responsibility for his actions, and even for events which he might have thought were not of his own doing. Hence the often repeated claim, in his addresses to his fellow citizens: 'We all have our share of responsibility. All of us carry totalitarianism within ourselves.'

With the Soviet invasion, in 1968, and Jan Palach's death a few months later, the political climate changed drastically. For Havel, it meant that he could no longer maintain his ironic distance. He wanted to scream rather than laugh. If, in his earlier plays, he had been ironically modelling the totalitarian machine, he was now becoming vitally interested in the destiny of the human individual crushed under its wheels.

The philosophy of integrity and responsibility is what informs his later plays and what gives them the shape of Socratean dialogues. In the 'Vanek Plays', Havel introduces the protagonist, who serves as a catalyst, bringing to the surface and exposing the existential dilemmas of his environment. Often silent and self-doubting, Vanek is a kind of a modern Socratic character leading his co-players, but also readers and viewers, to clarify the nature of their 'presence in the world'. By his very presence, Vanek challenges basic ethical categories of human responsibility and integrity.

Havel's meticulously constructed plays are not always easy to decode, and the level of abstraction often makes identification and empathy with individual characters impossible. The Vanek plays—The Audience in particular—enjoyed international success, perhaps mainly because they clearly drew on Havel's personal experience, presenting real and tangible situations and characters.

Prison may have damaged Havel's health, but it did, as he acknowledges, wake him up from understandable lethargy and laziness to systematic and serious philosophical work. Having experienced, in prison, the Sartrean 'Hell is being with others', he could no longer satisfy himself with Sartre's intellectual 'roads to freedom', but had to reach for concrete tangible freedom, for himself and his nation, for which he felt responsible.

Havel used his prison time to search for his inner self, identity, individuality. In a letter to Olga, no. 13, he writes:

You may find it odd that prison of all places should serve me for a self-reconstitution, but I truly believe that cut off for a longer period of time from all ties which I myself turned into limitations, I could gain inner freedom and a new sovereignty. This is not, of course, merely a revision of my view of the world, my aim is a better fulfillment of the tasks imposed on me by the world—as I see it. I do not want to change myself but be myself in a better way. This may resemble somewhat the hopes with which Dostoyevsky's heroes go to prison—but in my case, it is not so pathetic, so absurd, or so religious …

Largo Desolato (1984) bears the mark of Havel's experience of life in prison and of interrogations leading to it. Its main character is a man who falls victim to fabricated accusations, an intellectual whose identity is destroyed by the whims of officialdom, by a power system which wears him down and makes him not just its victim but also its co-creator. However steadfastly the hero, philosopher Kopriva, may hold to his intellectual integrity, he remains unable to maintain human relationships.

Havel is not just a playwright dealing with philosophical questions, but a philosopher in his own right. His plays, which started as jolly and absurd comedies, Ionesco style, gradually turned into modern Socratean philosophical dialogues. In them, however, wisdom is not imparted by a teacher to a student, but discovered in the course of a lonely character's conflict with a world whose reality does not match its established description.

To Havel, the appearance of absurd drama—which has also been referred to as 'anti-drama'—is a result of living under stress, with no obvious way out. Remove the stress and drama is set in motion anew, returning to its classic story shape. With no way out, Havel searches for a way in—a rediscovery of his identity which would no longer depend for its creation on external circumstances but could start creating itself from its own resources. From the discovery of a higher, timeless and self-generating dimension of Being, which Havel believes is present in man's inner self in any circumstances, comes that which removes the stress of absurdity. The rediscovery of a man's intrinsic higher identity is, to Havel's philosophical thinking, absolutely essential for any serious and systematic creative work. It is that which brings about the integration of the dissipated elements of man—and thus generates meaningful action.

One of the principal philosophical problems for Havel is probably the very concept of Being, which was the pivotal issue with all existentialists, Heidegger in particular. But Heidegger, or other existentialists, never presented a precise definition of the concept of Being. Havel felt a need to define it. While Heidegger's approach is focusing on the awareness of death, on 'Sein zum Tode' (Being towards Death), Havel affirms life as the absolute horizon and parameter of Being, including the human individual. Being as a philosophical issue is very much present in his later letters from prison. Havel writes:

The orientation of Being as a state of the spirit can also be interpreted as faith: a man oriented towards Being has profound faith in life, the world, morality, a purpose of things and of himself: his attitude to life is accompanied by hope, awe, humility and spontaneous respect for its mystery.

Havel is not only trying to define this concept in the context of awareness, consciousness, thinking, but also as a reflection of the spirit. He writes, 'What exactly is spirit, a reflection of consciousness? I would say that this dimension of "self" can be seen as a certain "duplication" of Being.'

The awareness of Being, which, for Havel, may be given any name including God, is a gradual integrative process, completing man inwardly and enabling him to reach self-realisation. It is an essential need of any man to aspire to his inner integrity, an ability to find within himself the very essence of Being, and identify with it.

Havel's entire work, dramatic, philosophical and political, is permeated with a desire to set things right, to rectify the absurdity of the world he lives in. To free the individual from lies, from meaningless phrases, from enforced pretence. He struggles against all that is shallow, vague and false in human relations. His quest is to help create a society in which individuals will again desire to understand each other, tolerate each other's shortcomings and forgive each other's mistakes and lapses. He refuses to be the judge of his persecutors because he knows that they, as tiny screws in a dehumanised machine, did not know any better.

His life as a writer, philosopher and statesman is an attempt to realise the utopian vision of a world where, in the words of a 1989 revolution poster, 'truth and love shall triumph over lie and hate'.