Havel’s whole approach was at right-angles to the official aesthetic dogma known as ‘socialist realism’. After the coup d’état of 1948, this dogma became part of the arsenal of the organized attempts to turn the theatre into a political instrument of Marxism-Leninism. The stage was required to defend the new totalitarian order, initially by discrediting the power and ideology of its ‘class enemies’, the ‘bourgeoisie’, whose agents were seen to be operating both within and without the country. The theatre was required as well to propagate positive images of the present and future. Its job was to help spread the Truth of Marxism-Leninism, to endorse specific policy decisions of the government, and above all to sing praise to the Party and its world-historic hero-leaders.
In practice, the official cultivation of socialist realism required the education and re-education of new dramatic cadres untainted by ‘bourgeois’ prehistory. They were required to see that artistic criteria were nothing: Communist principles were everything. The time frames of the plays varied. Some plays concentrated on the ‘bourgeois’ past. Vojtěch Cach’s The Viaduct at Duchcov (1950) featured the bloody confrontation between striking workers and the Czechoslovak militia during the Masaryk period of bourgeois ‘pseudo-democracy’. Other plays concentrated on the present. An example was Otto šafránek’s The Honour of Lieutenant Baker (1950), which tracked the fate of an American pilot who had been on board the fighter plane from which the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Shortly after leaving the armed forces, Baker had become unemployed, the sharp experience of which opened his eyes to the evils of capitalism and the necessity of Communism. During Havel’s teenage years, the title of many of the most respected socialist-realist productions — Jaroslav Nezval’s adaptation of President Zápotocký’s When the New Warriors Will Rise (1949), Ilja Bart’s Coal is Mining Man (1950) and Karel Stanislav’s Built by Bricklayers (1950) — give a flavour of what was expected by the commissars of culture. The model play of this period was usually about a project important for the building of socialism, in which a worker or the working class were as a rule treated positively as heroes standing up for socialist virtues. The stage was filled with shirt-sleeved men, women clad in bright-red dresses, singing and chortling children. Usually a ‘class enemy’ or two stood in their way. And the plot was often thickened by the presence of foreign spies and conspirators. The drive towards socialism was sometimes seen to fall into difficulties. This was not because of saboteurs or divided and twisted characters, but due to insufficient morale among some workers. But it was supposed that even they grasp that all problems are ultimately solved by the wise application of the scientific homilies of Marxism-Leninism. So they ultimately rise to the occasion, leaving the play to work towards an obligatory happy ending that again proves the triumphant march of socialism into the world. All this is typically a cause for celebration. As the plot unfolds, audiences are encouraged to split their sides in laughter. The standard-formula socialist-realist play was a comedy, since this genre best reflected the official optimism of the Party about the march of history upwards and forwards into the future.
For Havel, socialist realism was no laughing matter. The whole genre of socialist realism was tedious and tiresome — and philosophically mistaken. So he set about proving that it was possible to sustain a different — more exciting, unpreaching — genre of theatre that could both expose the limits of socialist realism and push beyond its narrow horizons, so as to enable theatre to speak to its audience in radically more concrete and vibrant ways. The whole aim was to do theatre well without taking itself too seriously. This at least was the instinct that developed during his army days, so that while still in uniform Havel decided to sit the entrance exams to allow him to study dramaturgy at the theatre department of AMU. Required to write under examination conditions an analysis of a play called The Eccentric, by Nazim Hikmet, Havel produced a well-written hyper-Marxist interpretation that concluded that the narrative contained the basic laws of dialectical materialism. It was a skittish attempt to practise the art of deception, but it failed. The admissions board smelled a rat and rejected him.
So Havel had no choice but to fall back upon family connections to find his way into the official world of theatre. His father was an old friend of the performer, entertainer and playwright Jan Werich. Werich, who was about to retire, offered him a job as a stage-hand at Prague’s ABC Theatre. Built in 1928 by the architect O. Polívka and situated in a labyrinth of passages that linked up with the Lucerna complex that was once owned by the Havel family, the ABC Theatre was the site of Havel’s emotional conversion to the stage. He dropped the commonplace prejudice that a theatre is the mechanical sum of its plays, booking office, ushers, actors, auditoriums, toilets, and audiences. ‘It was there I came to understand,’ he later reflected, ‘that theatre doesn’t have to be just a factory for the production of plays.’ His time with Werich was inspiring. He adored watching Werich perform — the famous dialogues (forbíny) between Werich and Horníček in front of the curtain during intermission Havel found unforgettable — so much so that they convinced him that the theatre could be ‘a place for social self-awareness, a vanishing point where all the lines of force of the age meet, a seismograph of the times, a space, an area of freedom, an instrument of human liberation. I realized that every performance can be a living and unrepeatable social event, transcending in far-reaching ways what seems, at first sight, to be its significance.’130
Each evening at the ABC Theatre, Havel eagerly pitched in with the practical work of creating the special magnetic field that develops around a successful playhouse. In his spare time he also wrote a few theoretical articles for the theatre magazine Divadlo. He turned his hand as well to writing another play, initially for himself. It was crafted in the style of Ionesco and called An Evening with the Family (Rodinný veČer [1959]). Although it wasn’t performed at the theatre, it was good enough to land him a job offer, in the summer of 1960, at Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí). A converted former warehouse located just near the River Vltava in cobblestoned old Prague, the Balustrade had been founded two years earlier by Ivan Vyskočil and Ji ří Suchý following a split that developed among the organizers of another small theatre called Reduta, which had until then been the pioneering small theatre in the Prague scene. The Balustrade Theatre was typical of the small theatres springing up at the time, and although (as Havel wrote in a letter to Werich) he had been profoundly satisfied by his time at the ABC, he instantly felt more at home at the Balustrade. He liked the head of its drama section, Ivan Vyskočil, who was a multi-talented ‘hands-on’ figure who did everything from playwrighting to acting and directing. The people working at the theatre were also closer in age to Havel; and he found that they were less interested in reviving plays from the past than in creating something new.
Something of the spirit of the early Balustrade is evident in Hitchhiking (Autostop [1961]), the first-ever Havel play written (with the help of Vyskočil) and performed there. It is an absurdist satire of the automobile, which is represented as an icon of the burgeoning conspicuous consumption of modern societies, both of the capitalist and socialist variety. In effect, the play tries to plant the idea that what Marx called the fetishism of commodities is not just a chronic feature of ‘bourgeois’ societies, but of socialism as well. The play contains three loosely related parts. Hitchhiking uses a variety of absurdist verbal gags to explore the theme of the obsession with owning a car, which was a prominent and growing status symbol in Czechoslovakia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that is, during and after the official declaration that the country had at last achieved socialism. The play tells of the good fortune of an unadventurous and pudding-headed young man who wins an automobile in a lottery and is catapulted overnight into a sought-after society idol. The theme of the second part of the play is strikingly similar to Ionesco’s Le Salon de l’ Automobile (1953), in that it relies on the device of bringing inanimate objects to life to the point where they come to dominate and deaden living human beings. Ionesco tells of a buyer riding away in a newly acquired vehicle that is female, and that he decides to marry. Havel shows how people obsessed with owning or driving cars begin to speak in sounds resembling their engines. Human feet start to look like car wheels. Some individual car-lovers are even transformed into cars. In contrast to the grotesque and dark atmosphere within many Ionesco plays, Hitchhiking is rollicking fun. For those who don’t find it so, or don’t get the point, a university professor (originally played by Vyskočil himself) steps into the car-crazed culture to deliver a mock lecture on the historic transformation of people into automobiles. The didacticism grows during the last part of the play, when the degree and scope of the reigning automobile craze is tested scientifically according to the criterion of hitchhiking: the reaction of individual car-owners when asked for a lift reveals the degree to which they have been either dehumanized or retain a few sparks of humanity in an age of commodity fetishism.