Václav Havel's Second Wind

Vaclav Havel's Second Wind M.C. BRADBROOK Sentenced to four-and-a-half-years' imprisonment in October 1979 for his work in Czechoslovakia as spokesman for Charter 77, in January 1983 Vaclav Havel developed viral pneumonia complicated by an abscess on the lung; he was sent first to Prague Pankrac prison hospital, then when his sentence was suspended , to Charles University Hospital. His first act was to appeal for his fellow prisoners, whom he named in an article recently printed in Ceske Slovo, newspaper of Czech exiles. I From prison came "Reflections on the Theatre," printed in Index on Censorship, April 1983 (translated from the unofficial quarterly Kriticky Sbornik [Critical Review], No. 4/82). This document, dated 14 November 1981, asserts that: ... I only devoted myselfto the theatre insofar as it allowed me to do something I enjoyed doing, and insofar as it seemed to me that working in the theatre was worthwhile.... Theatre per se or at any price is certainly not my cup oftea.... To put it in a nutshell, I am not what people are pleased to call "a man ofthe theatre," i.e. a professional to whom the theatre is the one and only mission in life. If I devoted myself to the theatre, then it was only to a certain type of theatre. ... (p. 3I ) Havel runs through his story, from scene-shifting in Werich's theatre to meeting with the plays ofIonesco and Beckett at the Theatre of the Balustrade, where Jan Grossman, the director, launched him as a playwright. In the sixties, The Memorandum, The Garden Party and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration established him internationally, before the collapse of the "Prague Spring." As he himself observes, his first phase ended very precisely on 22 August 1968. But he is still writing plays: [I]t does seem to me that I haven't yet exhausted myself as regards the authorship of plays. I have lots of ideas - vague but all the more tantalising for that - as to what else I might do in this sphere, and so there is more than enough there to keep me on the rack. I Havel's Second Wind I25 am, as you well know, an obsessive man.... And so it is that - albeit at a distance - I am staying with the theatre. (p. 32) Yet, he adds, he knows he could leave the theatre and start something else. The plays of the second half of the seventies - Audience, Vernisaz (Private View) and Protest, written for a handful of friends and acted privately with author in the lead - have appeared in the West, unlike the earlier Conspirators (I971) and an adaptation of Gay's The Beggar's Opera, courageously staged on I November I975 in the village of Hornf Pocernice, as already recorded in this journa1.2 Audience and Private View (I975), adapted for radio by Vera Blackwell, were given by the B.B.C. with Harold Pinter in the lead in I979. During the next year, Editions Gallimard published the three plays, translated by Marcel Aymonin and Stephan Meldegg, in a volume which also includes "Le Theatre et Ie Pouvoir," an Open Letter to G. Husak (the Head of State), with an abridged version of the manifesto of the Charter 77 movement. The difference between his work in the sixties and what Havel himself ironically calls "my famous second wind" might be suggested by saying that, while the first group are close to Ionesco, the second group invite comparison with the earlier existentialists of the Resistance, and with the early Beckett. All ofHavel's clowns, but especially those of Audience and Protest, are conceived with tenderness and depth. In Ionesco, the fear of death is basic; in Havel, that quality defined by medieval schoolmen as synteresis - the divine spark, the implanted seed of God which endows man with integrity and acts as his compass for movement. Camus, or Anouilh's Antigone (I944) - "I am not here to understand, I am here to say NO" - sum up the theme of these later plays. Perhaps even closer is the apologetic tone of Beckett's En Attendant Godot, which in the French text bears clearer traces of the wartime...