Havel was among those who clung to the old-fashioned ‘bourgeois’ principle of power-sharing, but throughout his teenage years he managed, protected by the political privilege of youth, to escape the direct hand of the state. It first clawed at him during the year 1957, when he was drafted for two years into the Czechoslovak army. Going into uniform was not foreordained — against his mother’s wishes, Havel deliberately gave up being a laboratory assistant and studying chemistry at the Technical University in Prague115 — but whatever unhappiness that resulted from his declining interest in the natural sciences was not washed away by army life. After completing induction and basic training, he was assigned to a regiment of sappers within the Fifteenth Motorized Artillery Division, based in České Budějovice, south of Prague. As a black sheep of ‘bourgeois’ origins — a ‘member of old Prague’s dynasty’116 — the crew-cut Havel found himself among other young men branded with various black marks. The point of the assignment — that they were considered by the officer class as dregs and potential cannon fodder — quickly dawned on each of them. The Czechoslovak army ‘borrowed from the Soviets the tradition of sending the less worthwhile elements of the population to serve with the sappers’, said Havel later, ‘because in any action the sappers go in first and lose a higher percentage of men’.117
The realization that others thought him dispensable, coupled with his intense dislike of boondoggling — lugging around a bazooka, barracks routine, petty discipline, and the meaningless tomfoolery of mess-hall culture — prompted Havel to complain bitterly about army life, especially to his trusted girlfriend, vivacious and beautiful Olga šplíchalová. The pair had first met in 1953, thanks to a mutual friend named Zdena Tichá, at the well-known Prague writers’ hangout on the embankment, the Café Slavia. Havel was struck by her natural beauty and was attracted as well to her mature confidence — she was three years older than him — and to her self-taught interest in the arts. She had already tried her hand at co-writing a television script version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She was interested in the history of painting, liked to go to the cinema and to read novels (her favourite authors were Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner), and she loved and lived for theatre. At the time Havel laid eyes on her, she was taking private acting lessons with the drama teacher Ludmila Wegenerova, and was soon to make her stage debut — as the lead role of Cinderella in a performance for children at the Mÿj Theatre in Vinohrady. For her part, Olga was especially attracted to the seventeen-year-old Havel’s way with words. She thought him impractical, yet the chubby, blond-haired, boyish-looking young man seemed highly educated and immensely clever, and she was most impressed that he was already writing poems, one of which he dedicated to her. It redescribes their place of first meeting:
Beyond the window of the café sleet is raging
We are silent with the desired cigarettes, I don’t know
how one could imagine us without them.
It is hard to explain.
what we’re observing in ourselves without defences.
It’s growing dark, on the lookout tower a red star shines,
for lovers in happy moments
Words join to express his feelings of mystery, exoticism, strangeness in Olga’s presence:
Your soul is a suburb full
of smoky roads, muddy paths,
walls, cemeteries and telegraph poles
full of life’s dramas
of people living somewhere on the edge of our
strange era. You read verse,
you’d like to be an actress and you say
that you’re as cruel as the scourge of God.
And strangeness put more directly, but in hope:
It took half a day before we could really communicate.
You, Žižkov’s daughter, I, still an inexperienced
habitué of writers’ cafés. The two of us,
somewhere on the edge of spring.
Yet not quite springtime. More like unconsummated desire:
Day is dawning, the frogs in the pond at your place
are croaking furiously, quiet, not a soul anywhere.
We’re standing by the wall, which is set
with shards of glass
to make life difficult for thieves.
I’m struck by comparisons with myself — a thief,
and with your face — a wall with shards to make
the way to your soul more complicated for me.118
Havel’s comparison of himself to a burglar and Olga to a wall covered in broken glass was perhaps understandable, given that when they first met she was seeing someone else, so that it took him three years to pluck up the courage to ask her out. Alas, the times were such that not even serious romance was safe from the clutches of arbitrary state power. Havel’s bellyaching to Olga about life in the army brought her instant trouble. Strolling one day down Wenceslas Square, Olga was telling a girlfriend just how ‘awful’ Václav was finding his treatment. All of a sudden, out of thin air, a man began to chase them, calling out menacingly, ‘Comrade, what did you say? What was that?’ They ran as fast as they could, and fortunately managed to give him the slip.
When Havel heard this story from Olga, he was uncowed. Olga toughened his views. Born in Žižkov, one of the roughest working-class districts of Prague, Olga šplíchalová was a strong woman with radical views that harboured no sympathy for Communist nonsense. As a young girl, she had refused to join the Pioneers and the Czechoslovak Youth Union and, from the early 1950s, Olga always referred to the Communists as ‘Bolsheviks’, and as ‘cheats’ and ‘criminals’. She had been raised by her mother, to whom she was so close that fiery disagreements between them were common. The fires were fuelled by the fact that Olga’s mother had joined the Party immediately after the military defeat of the Nazis. As a strong-headed sixteen year old, Olga quarrelled with her about the trainload of gifts dispatched by Prague workers to Stalin in 1949, in time for his 70th birthday. Olga also found repugnant her mother’s shy defence of the execution, during the following year, of the former member of parliament, Milada Horáková, whose trial on trumped-up charges of leadership of the subversive conspiracy against the Republic’ was broadcast live over street amplifiers in Prague. The biggest row followed her mother’s decoration of one of their flat’s window-ledges with metal portrait reliefs of Beneš, Stalin and Gottwald. One morning, during an argument, teenage Olga took aim with a hammer and knocked all the great men down. Her mother grew so furious that she threw every bit of Olga’s clothing out the window into the courtyard below. Olga retaliated by locking herself in the toilet for the rest of the day.119
Havel meanwhile began planning another act of ‘dissidence’, as it would later be called. He fought back quietly against barracks discipline by banding with an army buddy named Karel Brynda. Both privates were interested in literature and one evening, over beer, it occurred to them that it just might be possible to lighten their parade-ground and training duties and cheer themselves up by writing about the absurdity of their army lives. The regiment had a theatre troupe, which was pretty second-rate. Both men were also aware that there was something of a tradition, or at least a precedent for, plays being written for and about army life. So during the first year of service, Brynda and Havel got permission from the regiment commander to cut their teeth on a staged performance of Pavel Kohout’s September Nights (1955). Set within the army, itself seen as a microcosm of the contemporary Czechoslovak regime, the drama tracks the fate of Major Cibulka, the officer in charge of political affairs. He is a well-meaning, dull-witted ideologue whose efforts to manage men result in the serious demoralization of the whole regiment. He has some potential officer rivals, including the ambitious First Lieutenant škrovánek, played by Havel, but the interesting thing about the play is its break with socialist stereotypes. The officer rivals for Cibulka’s post are not pictured as class enemies, which leaves the audience free — for a time — to question and judge the characters’ motives and even to wonder whether the system itself fails to recognize merit and so produces incompetents like Cibulka.
Havel and Brynda’s version of September Nights retained Kohout’s scripted resolution of the drama by introducing the deus ex machina figure of Colonel Sova, a wise man who in his capacity as Cibulka’s superior has the good sense to recognize the damage he is inflicting upon the regiment and to sack him from his post. Sova could have been seen by the audience as something of a Good Man Khrushchev or a Good Communist Novotný, or perhaps both. In this respect, Havel and Brynda’s production trod a difficult path between praise and criticism of the system, but the odd thing was that Havel himself aroused the suspicions of his company commander, who accused him of playing the role of škrovánek so convincingly that he had revealed his own personal designs on the post of company commander! Havel was demoted on the spot to a mere footsoldier. He was amused by the absurdity — and delighted to relinquish his bazooka, which was in any case heavy and needed to be cleaned every Saturday.
The demotion gave Havel more idle time, which he put to good use sketching fragments of a play in preparation for an all-army theatre-festival competition, to be held in Mariánské Lázně, a town west of Prague, on the German border. With the assistance of Brynda, he wrote and staged his first-ever piece, called You’ve Got Your Whole Life Ahead of You (Život p řed sebou[1959]). The script produced by the two budding playwrights — Brynda recalled — was simple and entertaining, but carefully constructed for a purpose. ‘That ridiculous little play was simply what we army boys called a piss-take (vychcanost),’ he said. ‘We did it to be cheeky to the authorities. It was a reaction to the stupid situation we found ourselves in, and nothing more.’120
Set within a small regiment, the amusing drama centres on Private Pavel Maršík, who falls asleep one night while on guard duty after having been out on the razzle. He is rudely awakened by gunfire. An intruding civilian lies on the ground, wounded by shots fired from the rifle owned by Maršík. He is suddenly in trouble: asleep on duty and without possession of his weapon, which had been mistakenly taken by the officer on duty, Corporal Jan (Honza) Kubeš, who actually did the shooting. The two men secretly agree that it is in their mutual interest to cover each other’s backs. Maršík is quickly rewarded for his duplicity. He is written up in the local newspaper, congratulated by his officers, and promoted to lance-corporal. But undeserved success gnaws at his conscience, even though his mates try hard to convince him that everything means nothing and therefore anything goes. ‘Is it really such a big deal, getting promoted to lance-corporal?’ sneers a buddy. ‘Or do you mean that little item in the newspaper? Hmm. Today they write about you, and tomorrow there’ll be an article about a milkmaid and the day after tomorrow about the guy who slops the pigs. You don’t really believe anybody reads that, do you?’ The same buddy threatens blackmail. That makes Maršík fret and fume, but his moment of reckoning soon arrives: he is asked to join the Party. He accepts, following the company commander’s reminder to him that his whole life is in front of him, and that he should not ruin it through senseless posturing. In the final scene of You’ve Got Your Whole Life Ahead of You the induction meeting is convened. Lavishly wooden speeches supporting Maršík’s candidacy are given. He then begins his acceptance speech... during the course of which he surprises and embarrasses everybody gathered by slowing down, falling silent and staring into the distance. Maršik has refused temptation. His reputation is probably ruined, but his future is now wide open. He has made the essential gesture of resistance to untruth, amorality and duplicity.
Although the commanders of Havel’s regiment were not themselves experts in matters of theatre, they shared a native dislike of the play, initially because they could not accept that Czechoslovak soldiers, even rookies, fall asleep on duty.121 Behind their disapprobation stood the suspicion that this was army theatre with a difference, which it most certainly was. The play is simply structured, so simply in fact that it is easy to discern within it some of the standard theatrical tropes for which, within a few years, Havel would become a world-famous playwright. It is true that the dozen or more plays that Havel subsequently wrote during the next thirty years can be clumped into several different categories. There are plays that are nominally based on, and in content redolent of, other plays written earlier by others. The Beggar’s Opera (Žebráckáopera [1975]) is an example of his rather conventional attempt to use well-known plays as a vehicle for Havelian ideas. So is his last-ever script, King Lear (1989), which examines the extent to which the world of powerful people collapses when they are driven from their positions of power.
Then, at the opposite extreme, there are plays which are written so as to be unperformable. Like The Mountain Hotel (Horský hotel [1981]), they are an exercise in twisting and stretching the conventional structures of theatre into something entirely unrecognizable, even at the risk of bringing theatrical forms to breaking point. These are plays which are so abstract that they resemble formal experiments that have little or no chance of being staged successfully. In between is a variety of plays that are ‘political’, in that they take a stand against the dominant power structures by raising uncomfortable questions about how lives are malformed and misshapen by those structures. Some of these political plays concentrate on the deeply personal aspects of unequal and dominating power relationships. An example is Audience (Audience [1975]), a treatment of a fictional character, a brewery worker named Ferdinand Vaněk, whose drunken conversations with his beer-swilling, burping, bullshitting, belligerent, bosom-buddy boss have much that is perspicuous to say about inequalities of power in ‘the world as it is’. Other plays within this political category concentrate more on the structures through which power is exercised over individuals. The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost [1963]) falls within this group. It is a play that concentrates especially on the power effects of language, including the structural mechanisms — of syntax and vocabulary — that enable distorted language to colonize and deform the lives of individuals. The same theme is central to The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (Ztížena možnost sousl ředění [1968]) in which a computer named Puzuk displays a good deal more emotion than any human being.
Through these different — arbitrarily defined — categories run several threads that are common to the plays that Havel wrote from the time of his days in the barracks. The plays normally probe the tortuous world of some bureaucratic organization in order to uncover its vastly complex, but standardized, patterns of interaction. The organization usually resembles two worlds fused into one: the world of Franz Kafka, choking on metaphysical anguish, and the world of Jaroslav Hašek, populated with low-life clowns.122 Few, if any, references are made to the world outside, but rather like the plays of Harold Pinter, which also confine themselves to a single setting, a whiff of threatened violence — as in You’ve Got Your Whole Life Ahead of You — is constantly in the air. The organizations being probed are barren — like Beckett’s stage — and oppressive. Like Kafka’s buildings, these functional organizations are purposeless, even though they exercise immense power over the lives of those who live and work within them.
Havel’s probes into the world of pointless bureaucracy, in which everything is ‘just the way it was planned’123, poke fun at its fastidious rituals, its confusions, dark sides, neurotic compulsions, and its hidden and open conflicts. The language games played within it are the special target of Havel, who has been described, correctly, as a ‘master juggler of words’.124 Conversation between characters — as in The Memorandum (Vyrozumění [1965]) — is reduced to mechanical phrases, as if language were now computerized-clichés. Behind Havel’s mockery of vacuous bureaucratic language (kecy) there usually stands the plight of the Ordinary Individual, normally a man, who finds himself caught up within, and struggling against, a vast spider’s web of power and intrigue.
The struggle for identity, for recognition and power, resembles life — the struggle is endless, full of setbacks, and usually doesn’t succeed — except that it is worth noting that in Havel’s plays the divided and dominated individuals never band together in groups to resist and overcome their powerlessness. Like the Chief Censor Aram in The Conspirators (Spiklenci [1970]), an official who compulsively munches sandwiches with monstrous punctuality, individuals are alone, very often twisted and deformed by the power that is exercised over them. Havel dispenses with the masks and costumes of classical tragedy. His characters are obviously in an advanced state of confused disintegration. Havel usually develops this depressing point at length, and in so doing tries to prevent his audiences from prematurely taking sides, for or against a would-be hero. His plays in fact contain no heroes because they desist from all forms of moralizing and political propaganda. Havel describes himself as a ‘sarcastic critic of all arrogant explainers of the world’.125 He therefore rejects as mistaken all ideas of so-called ‘political theatre’. He explains that ‘the theatre shows the truth about politics not because it has a political aim. The theatre can depict politics precisely because it has no political aim.’126 The techniques of emplotment of the plays try to ensure this by relying upon liberal uses of irony, the parroting of almost identical clichéd words and phrases, often in entirely different contexts, and of inverted repetition. And Havel’s characters — unlike Beckett’s, for whom there are questions without answers — provide answers without being asked any questions.
The combined effect of these techniques is to work against the immediate and ‘automatic’ bonding between play and audience. Audiences are rather encouraged to see the absurdity of normal situations. Havel’s aim is to make the play exceed its author, so that it is ‘cleverer than he is’127, so that through the mediation of the play — no matter what Havel was consciously intending — audiences come to grasp some deeper truths about their times. The feeling of absurdity experienced by the audience, says Havel of his plays, results from the sense of estrangement (ozvláštnění) which ‘turns into nonsense that which made sense before, it denies the given situation, reverses and negates it’.128 So spectators are held back from identifying easily with the action on stage, and this has the paradoxical effect, or so Havel intends, of increasing the ‘involvement’ of the audience with the play. Theatre should ‘provoke the audience, stimulate their fantasies, put questions before them, force them to find their own answers — to motivate them into not forgetting everything about the play by the time they reach the foyer’.129 The audience are not patronized as idiots incapable of judging for themselves what the play or its particular characters ‘mean’. They are not on the receiving end of sermons delivered from the playwright’s pulpit. Audiences instead find themselves drawn into the intrigues of the open-ended, puzzling, sometimes riotously funny plot, in consequence of which they are gently but surely forced to become active interpreters of the webs of stories that comprise the play. They are themselves cast in the role of co-determiners of its meaning. It might even be said that they become part of the play — that they not only understand but overstand the play, thereby transforming the physical place of the theatre building into a shared public space, within which basic questions about the contemporary human condition are raised, worked through, but not easily answered.