SOURCE: "Living Lies: Václav Havel's Drama," in Cross Currents, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 200-11.

Americans were captivated by the 1989 election of Vaclav Havel, a human rights activist who spent almost four years in prison, as the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia. Many who had heard that his ideas had played a vital role in the country's "Velvet Revolution" were introduced to his thinking through interviews, particularly the extended dialogue in Disturbing the Peace, as well as occasional pieces in the New York Review of Books. They learned even more from the philosophical-political essays of Living in Truth, and from Letters to Olga, the collection of fascinating, philosophical letters Havel wrote to his wife while he was in prison. Havel's political writings emphasize, among a great many other things, the "power of the powerless," the ability of seemingly impotent individuals to transform their societies through assuming responsibility for their humanity and living in truth.

Fewer Americans have been introduced to Havel's dramatic oeuvre, which provides a fascinating counterpoint to his philosophical and political thought. His plays, which have earned an international reputation and have won several awards in the U.S., were banned in Czechoslovakia between 1969 and 1989. In contrast to the moral clarity of the political essays, the plays explore the ethical ambiguity that plagues modern life regardless of its political context.

Havel, who served for a number of years as literary manager of the Balustrade Theater in Prague, has defined his dramatic goal as forcing the viewer/reader "to stick his nose into his own misery, into my misery, into our common misery, by way of reminding him that the time has come to do something about it…. Face to face with a distillation of evil, man might well recognize what is good" (Disturbing the Peace). Three major phases characterize Havel's drama: the early absurdist comedies; the Vanek morality plays; and the psychological-prison plays.

Absurdist Plays of the 1960s

Havel's first full-length play, The Garden Party (1963), demonstrates his enduring interest in the many roles language plays in modern society. As Havel himself notes, the action of The Garden Party is controlled by cliché, which not only inundates the dialogue but becomes the objective correlative of the humans who have surrendered themselves to the bureaucratic system.

The play derives its name from a garden party at an anonymous Liquidation Office. Hugo Pludek, the would-be protagonist, seeks a career in the system, but because each bureaucrat has become merely an interchangeable functionary, Hugo ends up compromising himself out of existence, unaware that the "Hugo Pludek" he is waiting to see at the end of the play is himself. As in the game of chess that forms a recurring motif in the play, the characters move in grid-like fashion within the rigid confines of prescribed, lifeless systems—social, political and linguistic—only to checkmate their own meaningless existences. Like a political address that avoids offending any group or individual, Hugo's final speech, echoing both Hamlet and Beckett's Watt, reduces the question of being to verbal gymnastics:

… we are all a little bit all the time and all the time we are not a little bit; some of us are more and some of us are more not; some only are, some are only, and some only are not; so that none of us entirely is and at the same time each one of us is not entirely;… I don't know whether you want more to be or not to be, and when you want to be or not to be; but I know I want to be all the time and that's why all the time I must a little bit not-be….

If the language games of The Garden Party relativize the human out of the equation, the use of a synthetic language—Ptydepe—enables Havel in The Memorandum (1965), winner of the Obie Award (1967–68) for best foreign play, to focus on the process by which humans abdicate their humanity to linguistic and/or political systems.

Josef Gross, the Managing Director of an anonymous bureaucracy, receives a memorandum in Ptydepe, an artificial language designed to make human communication scientifically precise by making words as dissimilar as possible. In his attempts to get the memo translated, Gross experiences the paradoxes of bureaucracy: he can obtain the documents he needs to authorize the translation only by having the memorandum already translated. While he struggles with the irrationality of the system, he falls victim to a subordinate's power play, is demoted, but eventually convinces Maria, a secretary, to translate his memo; the message, ironically, confirms in Ptydepe the inadequacy of the new language, urging its liquidation. The play ends with Gross back in charge and with the prospect of a new synthetic language—Chorukor—which will operate on linguistic principles of similarity.

In The Memorandum Havel explores the scientific effort to transform language into a technological tool. Here, the drive for scientific precision contends with the apparently human need for unpredictability. The language instructor's lesson on saying "boo" in Ptydepe illustrates how analysis increasingly deadens spontaneity: The decision as to which Ptydepe expression to use for "boo" depends on the rank of the person speaking and whether the "boo" is anticipated, a surprise, a joke, or a test, as in "Yxap tseror najx." Another hilarious example of a simple expression made as complex as possible is the word "Hurrah!," which in Ptydepe becomes "frnygko jefr dabux altep dy savarub goz texeres."

The precision exercised on analyzing the trivial contrasts with the imprecision in expressing what may be humanly significant. The ambiguous term "whatever," deemed the most used human expression, is rendered by the shortest Ptydepe word, "gh." Ironically, beneath all of the scientific pretensions, body language communicates and carries much of the action.

The preoccupation with using an artificial language in The Memorandum draws attention to the technological propensity to focus on means instead of ends. Enormous efforts to communicate precisely are undercut by the banality of what is expressed. Knowing the system, however, enables one to participate in the illusion of power and control. Like the specialized jargon of most professionals, Ptydepe represents an elitist code that paradoxically limits human communication both to a small group of cognoscenti and to those issues that can be analyzed and labeled.

Gross is caught between the need to fit into the system and his own humanistic platitudes. When Maria, fired because she translated the message without authorization, asks for his help, Gross excuses himself on the grounds that he cannot compromise his position as the "last remains of Man's humanity" within the system. He moves Hamlet's dilemma into Camus' theory of the absurd, and as so often in a scientific age, the descriptive becomes the normative:

Like Sisyphus, we roll the boulder of our life up the hill of its illusory meaning, only for it to roll down again into the valley of its own absurdity…. Manipulated, absurdity … automatized, made into a fetish, Man loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself, unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is.

Gross, the would-be existentialist who is always wishing he could start his life over, cannot translate his own language into responsible action. If Pudnik is entangled in language games devoid of human integrity, Gross demonstrates that when language becomes an end in itself, even the most accurate or the most eloquent expressions become impotent.

In the tradition of Kafka, Camus, and Beckett, probably his most significant mentors, Havel explores in The Garden Party and The Memorandum the paradox of human rationality pushed to its absurd logical extreme. As in Kafka, anonymous authority figures loom behind the absurd context; as in Beckett, the habits and rituals of daily existence frequently deaden people from the horror of their predicament; as in Camus, there is occasional recognition of the absurdity. But Havel's characters, unlike those of Camus, do not rebel; rather they adapt and use the absurdity as an excuse for their own inhumanity.

The Vanek Plays

Havel wrote three one-act plays in the mid-to-late 1970s that are based on one character, a Czech writer named Ferdinand Vanek: Audience (1975); Private View (1975); and Protest (1978). (In a fascinating twist to dramatic history, three other playwrights adopted Vanek for their own plays—Jiri Dienstbier, Pavel Kohout, and Pavel Landovský.) Havel's Vanek plays focus on the role of the writer in a society whose corruption extends from the workplace to the privacy of home, and even to the professional life of writers.

Audience (also published with Private View under the title Sorry …), is probably Havel's best known work in the United States: it is often paired with Catastrophe, a one-act play Samuel Beckett wrote and dedicated to Havel while the latter was in prison in 1982. Although superficially simple, Audience raises complex ethical questions. Essentially a dialogue between Vanek and the increasingly drunken head-malster of the brewery where Vanek works, Audience focuses on the brewmaster's attempts to persuade Vanek to compose the brewmaster's weekly reports in exchange for an easier job. To do so, however, Vanek would, ironically, be supporting the system he is against by informing on himself.

Vanek's reluctance to accept the offer precipitates the brewmaster's assault on intellectuals, which some critics see as the heart of the play:

It's all right if I get filthy—so long as the gentleman stays clean! The gentleman cares about a principle! But what about the rest of us, eh? He couldn't care less!… Principles! Principles! Sure you hang on to your flipping principles! Why not? You know damned well how to cash in on them, you know there's always a market for them, you know bloody well how to sell them at a profit! Thing is, you live on your flipping principles! But what about me?… Nobody's ever going to look after me, nobody's afraid of me, nobody's going to write about me, nobody's going to help me, nobody takes an interest in me! I'm only good enough to be the manure on which your flaming principles can grow!

The play ends with Vanek making a mock exit and re-entrance, starting the dialogue anew with the malster, this time readily accepting the proffered beer and joining immediately in camaraderie. The "underlying message" of the play, as Damien Jaques (drama critic of The Milwaukee Journal) notes, would seem to be that "artists can have principles that they refuse to violate [but] the common man doesn't have that luxury."

But truth, as Havel dramatizes it, is almost never so obvious. Among the inescapable ironies of Audience is that the brewmaster—rather than not having principles of his own—has merely exchanged them for the mechanics of the bureaucracy and, as a result, has become a slave to the system. Although ostensibly the one in power—he is in charge of Vanek and several other workers—he confesses himself powerless because he is a mere dispensable cog. Vanek, on the other hand, is a threat by virtue of being an authentic human being. The drunken brewmaster, a blustery administrator of the powers-that-be, ends up begging the timid Vanek to bring an actress to see him so that he can believe "I didn't live for nothing—." To "live for nothing," however, as Vanek's reticence implies, is as much a choice as to live on principle, to live for something. The ending of the play, suggesting an alternative scenario, leaves the larger "audience" with the question of which alternative is preferable.

"Living for nothing" comes in many different packages, however, as Private View—perhaps the most accessible and humorous of Havel's Vanek plays—amply illustrates. Michael and Vera are Westernized Yuppies who have invited Vanek for a "private view" of their newly redecorated apartment. That their lifestyle has become their only absolute is clear early on as Michael proudly shows Ferdinand the Madonna he has long sought in order to fit his "niche." Rather than adjusting the niche, he has traveled widely to find a Madonna the right size. Correspondingly, he and Vera fit all of life's experiences into the niches of their consumer clichés, which they try to convince Vanek are the "solution" to all of his presumed problems: he should redecorate; he should have a child; his wife should take cooking lessons, etc.

As the play progresses, Michael and Vera increasingly sound like commercials. When they reach the topic of their sex lives, they are quite willing to perform a demonstration for Vanek. As Michael notes,

"Vera has remained as smashing as ever…. The body she's got now! It's a knockout! So fresh and young! Well, you can judge for yourself. Darling, do you mind just opening your dress a little bit?… After we've finished our little chat, we're going to show you some more, so you'd see what sophisticated things we do to one another."

When Vanek demurs and starts to leave amidst a barrage of advice, Michael and Vera suddenly fall apart. Their facade is their existence, and with no one to impress, they lose their only reason for being. They browbeat Vanek into staying, and the play ends where it began.

Private View provides a glimpse of private life withdrawn and alienated from public and political concerns. Michael and Vera accuse Vanek of being a coward and a romantic because he will not compromise enough to get a socially respectable job. They, on the other hand, in substituting consumer comforts and "self-fulfillment" for social responsibility, have become dehumanized, merely part of the decoration in their apartment. The satisfaction Michael finds in the almond peeler he has brought back from the States suggests the way in which their being and purpose have been trivialized, their identity subsumed in the objects that they serve.

Havel, describing elsewhere the interdependence of the social and the private, the historical and the personal, alludes to the problem at the core of Private View:

… even the most private life is oddly distorted, sometimes to the point where it becomes implausibly bizarre, the paradoxical outcome of a paralyzing desire for verisimilitude. It is obvious what has made this desire so intense: the subconscious need to compensate for the absence of the opposite pole—truth. It is as though life in this case were stripped of its inner tension, its true tragedy and greatness, its questions. ("Stories and Totalitarianism," Open Letters)

If the "crisis of human identity" that Havel sees as the central question of all of his plays (Living in Truth) afflicts the bureaucrat, the blue-collar worker, and even the purely private relationships of spouses, it also afflicts writers themselves as the Vanek play Protest illustrates. Like all of his plays, Protest contains vague allusions to actual events or experiences in Havel's life.

As in the other two Vanek plays—and most of Havel's oeuvre—the action takes place in the language, in this case the dialogue between Vanek and Stanek, a fellow writer whose daughter is pregnant by a pop star who has just been arrested on a pretext. Stanek, who enjoys political immunity presumably because he can straddle issues, asks Vanek about protesting the pop star's arrest. When Vanek, who has already written a protest, presents Stanek with the document for his signature, Stanek's inner conflicts come to the fore. In a lengthy monologue Stanek analyzes the "subjective" and "objective" arguments for signing the protest, demonstrating through convoluted logic both how "they"—the authorities—think and how he excuses himself from taking responsibility. His speech embodies "double think," becoming a brilliant exercise in reducing morality to rationality. Stanek does not sign the document and the play ends when Stanek learns that the pop star has been released, making the protest superfluous.

Part of Stanek's rationalizing anticipates what Havel explores in greater detail in Largo Desolato: the widespread abdication of personal responsibility to the professionals in morality. Stanek points out that "the rest of us—when we want to do something for the sake of ordinary human decency—automatically turn to you [Vanek], as though you were a sort of service establishment in moral matters." The question of Stanek's signature, therefore, involves his claiming identity as a responsible human being, a claim he is unable to make.

Havel's Vanek, however, around whom moral issues arise, does not play the role of a moral authority; rather, he comes off as a self-ironic, timid soul whose occasional embarrassment becomes the only comment on the "bad faith" of the brewmaster, Michael and Vera, and Stanek. In all three plays Vanek, who speaks very little, becomes a sounding board for the characters' reflections on their own identities and concerns. His simplicity contrasts with their sophistication and sophistry. He occasionally questions, often offers understanding, never condemns. Rather, he allows his own integrity and motives to be questioned and attacked as the other characters attempt to implicate or discredit him. If he is an alter-ego of Havel, he is also an anti-hero, his humility and self-effacement pointing beyond the human to a standard of truth that enables the other characters to glimpse their own duplicity and that gives his own character both its quiet dignity and its self-parody.

Psychological-Prison Plays

When Havel returned from his stay in prison as a result of dissident activities, he wrote a short play (1983) in response to Beckett's Catastrophe. The play, entitled Mistake, foregrounds the human tendency—regardless of political system—toward totalitarianism, not only politically but privately as well. The plot is simple: four inmates in a prison—who have formed their own subsystem with their own kingpin—indoctrinate a new prisoner, who has inadvertently smoked a cigarette before breakfast, on his rights and responsibilities within the system. The new inmate. XIBOY, says nothing throughout the play, merely shrugging and looking embarrassed, to the increasing anger and frustration of the "King" and his cohorts, who finally realize that XIBOY is a "bloody foreigner." The play ends with King's "death sentence" for XIBOY.

The prison setting as a totalitarian system—although no doubt inspired by Havel's own recent experiences—underscores the human propensity not only to adapt to repressive systems but to duplicate them in subsystems, and to subjugate others, attempting to force them into uniformity. The seemingly trivial offense against "non-smokers' rights" becomes a major crime in the context of the repressive systems operating without and within and suggests a subtle challenge to the West's preoccupation with minor "rights" when larger questions of human survival and identity are at stake. The foreigner's death sentence comes about because, speaking another language literally and perhaps metaphysically, he cannot be indoctrinated and subsumed into the system. His silence and lack of complicity become a threat to the status quo.

Havel's two full-length post-imprisonment plays, Largo Desolato (1984) and Temptation (1985), further explore the themes of Mistake. Unlike the relatively flat characters of Pudnik and Gross in the earlier plays, the post-imprisonment drama excavates much deeper psychological terrain. In addition, the archetype of Faust joins Hamlet as the subtle distortions of truth become both increasingly ambiguous and perverse.

Largo Desolato, which won a Best Play Off Broadway award for 1985–86, probes the relationship between human identity and the roles one plays. Professor Leopold Nettles, an existentialist philosopher who has been under police surveillance and harassment for writing a paragraph "disturbing the intellectual peace," can escape from his dilemma by declaring that he is "not the same person who is the author of that thing." Nettles is so tortured by the expectations of his friends and by his own self-doubts, however, that he has virtually imprisoned himself within his own apartment and his own mind.

Like Vanek in Protest, Nettles has been the vicarious moral voice upon whom all his friends, who have surrendered their own voices, depend. He is their excuse not to be. Their vague expectations and dependence contribute to his identity crisis: is there a split between who he is and the roles others expect him to play? The dichotomy between Nettles's current internal torment and the image he has projected in the past is revealed through the other characters. His friend Bertram notes, "I can't escape the awful feeling that lately something inside you has begun to collapse … that you are tending more and more to act the part of yourself instead of being yourself."

In fact, Nettles in his desperation increasingly acts the roles that others project on him, using the same phrases they have addressed to him. Urged to put his philosophical ideas to some practical use, he ironically does just that: he uses his reputation and writings to seduce Marguerite, a young student whom he sees as "in mid-crisis about the meaning of life." Before the seduction is complete, however, the agents of the authorities appear. Nettles takes a stand, swearing that he will not disclaim his paragraphs, that he will not give up his "own human identity." The agents inform him that his protest comes too late: he has already given up his identity, and his signature, therefore, "would be superfluous." Like Stanek, Nettles has spent so much time analyzing and worrying about his image that he has lost his own identity in the process. The play ends where it began, but with Nettles taking a bow as the actor playing a role in a play about playing roles.

Largo Desolato anticipates Temptation in its depiction of the external and internal demons that make Nettles's existence a living hell. The prospect of going to prison seems trivial in comparison with the the torment and restrictions that Nettles experiences as a result of trying to serve all of his self-imposed masters, of playing all of the roles others expect of him. As in a dysfunctional family, most of the other characters have already abdicated their identities, becoming mere stage props or interchangeable characters, as evidenced by their very names—"First Sidney" and "Second Sidney," "First Chap" and "Second Chap," "First Man" and "Second Man." Largo Desolato depicts the loss of human identity both by those who depend on others to save them and by those who would save others from their own burden of humanity. For Havel, there are no specialists in being human; every human is challenged to be—or not to be.

Havel's long-term interest in writing a play based on the Faust legend found its fruition in Temptation, his latest full-length play. Temptation is by far Havel's wordiest play as he explores in depth the question of truth and the ways truth can be perverted. Havel's Faust, Dr. Foustka, who is a scientist, has been secretly studying black magic. Fistula, who plays the Mephistopheles role, becomes his mentor and points out that "the truth isn't merely what we believe, after all, but also why and to whom and under what circumstances we say it!" Here, ironically the Devil is paraphrasing Havel, who expressed this definition of truth in a 1982 letter to his wife (Letters to Olga [No. 138]). Later, the Deputy of the Institute in the play convolutes the definition:

The truth must prevail, come what may. But for that very reason we must remind ourselves that looking for the truth means looking for the whole, unadulterated truth. That is to say that the truth isn't only something that can be demonstrated in one way or another, it is also the purpose for which the demonstrated thing is used or for which it may be misused, and who boasts about it and why, and in what context it finds itself.

Foustka begins his struggle with truth where Nettles left off in Largo Desolato; Foustka's philosophic description of modern humanity leads Marketa, a secretary at the Institute, to fall in love with him. When, his ego inflated by the "conquest," Foustka is confronted by the Director and accused of pursuing unscientific knowledge, Foustka appeals to scientific truth and morality to exonerate him. He claims that he has studied the occult in order to expose its unscientific basis. Marketa, who has believed Foustka's appeal to a higher authority as a basis for truth, ends up as Foustka's Ophelia, dismissed from the Institute and singing in madness. Foustka later learns that Fistula is a secret agent of the Institute, sent to test his fidelity to scientific truth. Foustka is finally entrapped by the complex web of lies he has woven; like Nettles, he has created his own hellish prison.

Finally aware that his attempts to manipulate the system have failed, Foustka acknowledges the devil—"here among us"—not Fistula, but "the pride of that intolerant, all-powerful, and self-serving power that uses sciences merely as a handy weapon for shooting down anything that threatens it, that is, anything that doesn't derive its authority from this power or that is related to an authority deriving its powers elsewhere." The play ends with a witches' sabbath, chaos, Foustka being set afire, and a fireman coming to put out the flames.

Temptation constantly challenges common definitions of truth while affirming its fundamental significance. Havel masterfully demonstrates how the most "truthful" expressions can be demonic when truth is instrumentalized, made a tool for some human purpose. At the same time, he creates seemingly demonic characters who see clearly the logical inconsistencies of selective duplicity. Ironically, it is a devil figure quoting Scripture who points out that living in lies carries its own rules: "You cannot serve two masters at once and deceive them both at the same time!… You simply must take a side!" The play suggests, moreover, that to reduce truth to the limits of rationality in turn distorts the "truths" of that rationality. Temptation becomes a comic-bitter indictment of the postmodern mind.

The setting of Havel's plays alternates from modern apartment interiors to anonymous bureaucracies. Although the characters all seem to be aware of "higher authorities," those in charge might as easily be representatives of free-market countries as of communist or socialist regimes. As in Beckett, Havel's perennial setting is metaphysical: the contemporary human mind, imprisoned in its rationality, substituting scientific, political, and consumer systems to fill the need for an absolute.

The question of human identity that Havel explores in all of his works is not the issue of individual self-fulfillment that seems to preoccupy Americans. Rather, it is the universal question of the human on the brink of the twenty-first century, in which technical specialization has, paradoxically, produced greater standardization, and more and more people are living in an artificial environment, seduced by the comforts of effortless existence. The question for Havel from Pudnik to Foustka is whether humans choose to be or not to be human beings, to live in truth rather than to support the lies that make them mere adjuncts of one or another system: "Human identity, simply put, is not a 'place of existence' where one sits things out, but a constant encounter with the question of how to be, and how to exist in the world" (Letters to Olga [No. 139]).

And what is truth? Havel never tells us directly in his plays. He assumes that we will recognize the many forms of its opposite—the excuses, subterfuges, rationalizations, illusions, pretexts, sophistries—even if many of his characters do not. Truth for Havel seems inextricably linked with assuming responsibility for one's humanity. To the extent we fail, his drama implies, we live in misery; hope lies in recognizing and taking responsibility for "our common misery."