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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
This collection is a mixed bag. The Garden Party, for example, was extremely tedious and ought to have been a 10 minute play or an Einakter. Ditto for The Memorandum. Stalinist art sucks, but art written in reaction to it can suck just as much. I didn't find The Increased Difficulty of Concentration to be much more than a drawing room farce, but The Audience and The Unveiling were interesting, portraying two sides of Havel's alter-ego playwright Ferdinand Vanek's reduced status after going to prison. In the Audience, Vanek is just trying to make the best of being blackballed from the stage and forced to work in a brewery. In the Unveiling his bougie/nominally Communist friends Michael and Vera want to re-fashion him into their own image -- from gourmet cuisine, to Swiss records, to designer decor, to having a kid like theirs. They even offer to let him see how they make love. I imagine one point here is that Capitalism demands precisely the same type of conformity as the old Communist regime. But the kicker is that the couple is shattered when Vanek becomes uncomfortable with their exhibitionism and leaves, depriving them of the "unveiling" of their ill-gotten riches and their tawdry private lives. IMO this was the second-best piece in the collection. A companion piece, Protest, has Vanek confronted by sellout Stanek, a former playwright who now works for the regime TV station. Stanek has asked Vanek to help him with a human rights issue, but then offers him a two-paged monologue of excuses for himself not being a human rights fighter. We have the sneaking suspicion that Stanek is about to offer Vanek up to the authorities, but instead the piece is a display of the elaborate excuses sellouts offer. And, for me, this is the winner of the collection. A final piece in which a [Chinese?] prisoner is beaten up by racist prison thugs because he can't understand a word they're saying is, at best, a reminder of how nationalism is an ongoing problem in the Czech Republic.
If you're interested in the Czechoslovakia during the communist era, these plays are intriguing. I liked reading the artistic work of one of my favorite statesmen, but I still find it challenging to read plays.
Havel's ability to find humor and satire in the simplest things (ie Memorandum) is delightful. His life story is so unique. How many playwrights got elected president of the country where they spent so many years as a dissident? Interesting man, interesting work.