A tall man with a menacing face stepped front stage from behind the drawn curtain. Artfully, in slow motion, he lit a cigarette, which glowed brightly in the darkness of the makeshift theatre. The invited audience of 300 people — painters, writers, actors, relatives, even Havel’s ageing father — stilled. The speechless man carefully aimed a smoke ring in their direction, then began eyeing them defiantly. Nobody laughed. Nobody smiled. The man’s face began slowly to resemble that of a psychopath. He stared coldly at each person below and beyond the stage, beginning with the first row and working his way gradually sideways and backwards, one person at a time. There followed a second puff of smoke, accompanied this time by menacing glances directed like darts at every single member of the audience in the middle distance. By the time the third smoke ring circled overhead, everybody present had the feeling that something was amiss. It seemed that trouble had entered the theatre — even that they might well each have to pay a heavy price for choosing that night to drive to Horní Počernice, on the outskirts of east Prague, and to huddle, nervous and sweating, in a pub restaurant called U Celikovských, whose biggest room had been converted into a theatre sealed off with mattresses to hamper police entry and to muffle the roar of scruffy drunks in the adjoining bar.
The man completed his sinister inspection, then slipped silently behind the curtain. Time seemed to stop, as if fate’s turn had now come. The hearts of the audience thumped. Their brows sweated, their bottoms remained riveted to the creaky chairs. The tense atmosphere was toughened by the knowledge, shared by actors and audience alike, of just how dangerous the whole performance was. The play that was about to be performed had originally been written three years earlier, in 1972, for the Činoherní klub in Prague, but the crackdown after the Prague Spring had prevented its performance. Havel’s next-door neighbour at Hrádeček, the actor and director Andrej Krob — the man with the sinister face — proposed doing it by subterfuge. Havel agreed, and Krob set about pulling together a makeshift troupe of actors and stage-hands, who spent the next eighteen months rehearsing. So as not to be caught by the StB, the performers — Jan Kašpar, Lída Michalová, Jana Tůmová, Viktor Spousta among them — moved around from apartment to apartment. Krob, one of those figures who lived life seriously without taking it seriously, proved demanding. He always said, like Molière, that he’d like to die on stage.
Others regarded his despotic intensity with trepidation. ‘As a person, he’s wonderful,’ remarked Kašpar, ‘but as a director he’s awful.’ Lída Michalová also found him ‘terrible, intolerant, selfish’.213 Personalities aside, nobody really thought that a performance was possible, but everybody battled on, trying to improve the dialogue and to perfect the blocking and rhythm. A rehearsal was brought to Hrádeček, and soon after Havel wrote to Krob with his criticisms and advice: ‘You have chosen one of the most difficult plays,’ he reflected. ‘Every sentence must be precise; it must have an exact meaning. It may not be important in some realist-psychological play if Nora says to Ingrid “You are evil”, “You are cruel”, or “Ingrid, you piss me off”. But here, the whole effect stands and falls on language, its exactness, the logic of its syntax, its melody and rhythm. Every word is important, no word can be omitted or altered. If you do, the situation immediately loses its spark and becomes just a story.’ Havel added a paragraph of warm praise. ‘Regardless of whether you get through to the end and what the outcome is, I think it’s great that you are searching together for something, that you are able to find time and energy for something which is burdensome and will not bring you any profit. It seems to me that it is something unique, good and meaningful in today’s earth-bound world.’214
Havel and his old theatre friend Jan Grossman came to see the dress rehearsal. The two masters of contemporary Czech theatre gave their seal of approval, and young bearded Viktor Spousta, who was to play a lead role in the play, set about finding a place for the performance. It had to be accessible to the audience but inaccessible to the police. U Čelikovských, the pub restaurant in Horní Počernice, seemed perfect. Costs were covered by selling a limited number of tickets. Havel, hitherto bewildered, grew excited. He was about to see the only one of his plays ever to be performed under late-socialist conditions. Others doubted that it would happen. An hour before the performance was due to start, only a handful of relatives had taken their seats. Everybody presumed the worst: that the StB had got wind of the event and had already begun roadblocks and arrests.
A chink of light, then a curtain suddenly opening to reveal a stage, costumed actors, a table, chairs, movement, expression, and words. Catharsis: the first and only performance of The Beggar’s Opera had begun. For the next two hours, the audience grinned, laughed and clapped its way through Havel’s adaptation of John Gay’s early eighteenth-century musical play. Through his anglophile friend and literary scholar, Zdeněk Urbánek, Havel had discovered some years earlier Gay’s work, whose central character is Captain Macheath, a highwayman and lighthearted winner of women’s hearts. Macheath falls in love and marries Polly, but her father, a receiver of stolen goods who also makes a living by informing on his clients, is not pleased. Furious at her folly, he decides to spoil the marriage by grassing on Macheath, with the aim of elevating his daughter into the ‘comfortable estate of widowhood’, Macheath is arrested and sent to Newgate prison, where, awaiting execution, he manages to conquer the heart of a woman named Lucy. Polly and Lucy subsequently do battle for the affection of the swashbuckling Macheath, who shows no remorse (‘How happy could I be with either, Were t’other dear charmer away!’) as he makes his escape from prison.
Havel’s emplotment of The Beggar’s Opera runs a different course. There is no music and no singing — the opera form is stripped bare — and no happy or charming endings. It is nonetheless a comic treatment of a world in which each individual cheats on every other individual. Even the notion of honour among thieves is exposed as romantic nonsense. Everybody behaves selfishly. Selfishness is ‘reality’, and there appears to be no alternative but to act ‘realistically’, which means accepting that the system encourages and depends upon chronic lying, double-crossing, back-stabbing, trickery, the greedy pursuit of self-interest as it is defined at that particular moment. To act in contrary ways, for instance to embrace precepts like honesty or care for others, would amount to pure foolishness that would then simply play into the hands of others. In any event, acting according to those old-fashioned precepts doesn’t occur to anybody. Individuals’ power to act on the world has been reduced to pure manipulation and self-manipulation. Moral thinking as such, the habit of examining people and events in terms of means and ends, has disappeared. The small evils of knavery have become utterly banal. Language itself is corrupted. Sentences are no longer means of communication. Words have become mere tools of manipulation.
William Peachum, the boss of a thieves’ network, is locked in battle with Macheath, the chief crook of a competing crime syndicate. Peachum tries everything to outsmart his rival. He is naturally delighted at the news that his daughter Polly has secretly been having an affair with Macheath. Peachum has plans for her. He also manages to recruit Harry Filch, a freelance pickpocket and former employee of Macheath. Peachum does business as well with Madame Diana, who runs an up-market brothel. She needs precious objects like silver cutlery, a few candelabras, and a few yards of brocade for some new curtains, and in return offers to supply Peachum with one of her best girls. Mrs Peachum agrees that her husband, in order to outcompete the swashbuckling Macheath, needs to improve his ways with women. For Macheath has a superior reputation in this field. He is renowned as a powerful desperado, a bon vivant, a physically attractive man of gall and charm and seduction. His formula for success is simple: his strategy with women is to simulate an inferiority complex because (he says) ‘women love to help someone and to save someone’. Macheath, who likes to calculate gains and losses, admits that things are a bit more complex than that. Inexperienced ‘nice’ women, for instance, are exciting to seduce and they offer their services free. But, lacking erotic experience, they are seldom physically satisfying and, besides, their seduction sometimes takes up precious time that could be better spent making money. They also have a nasty habit of falling in love. So, Macheath reasons, prostitutes are a better bargain. ‘Agreement is quick,’ he says, ‘shame does not prevent them from co-operating with any of your desires. And the act itself does not complicate your life with their feelings or demands.’ If for any reason a prostitute does try to cling on, he concludes, getting rid of her is simple. ‘Either behave towards such a person so despicably that her lingering dignity prevents her from maintaining an interest... Or the second possibility is simply to marry her.’
Macheath speaks from experience. It transpires that he is a bigamist and is already married to Polly, Peachum’s daughter. When he finds that out, Peachum instructs her to become his secret agent inside Macheath’s organization — with the aim of liquidating it. The same thought occurs to Macheath, who soon receives a visit from Polly, who betrays her father’s trust by confessing to her husband that her father is preparing a plan that will send him to the scaffold. Macheath no sooner berates her for not uncovering the precise details of his fate than he is lured into the arms of an old lover who now works at Madame Diana’s establishment. The prostitute cries rape, Macheath is arrested by the police, and promptly carted off to prison. Peachum’s plan has worked — with the help of the Chief of Police, Lockit.
The Chief of Police is a calculating knave and although working for Peachum tries to recruit Macheath into his own network of crime-fighting criminals. Lockit is unaware that his daughter Lucy is married to Macheath, whom she helps to escape with a hacksaw. But Macheath doesn’t last long on the outside. He is arrested in Madame Diana’s establishment while hiding out there, but a worse fate follows. His two wives finally catch up with him. He tries to rescue his reputation with oratory. ‘No, girls, if I was to best fulfil my responsibility towards you,’ he says, reminding them that in hours he might be on the scaffold, ‘I could not follow other men in this matter, but had to follow my own path, maybe untrodden, but decidedly more moral — that is, the path which gives you equally the same measure of legitimacy and dignity.’ On goes the duplicity. On and on. Lockit has Filch arrested and executed after he refuses to co-operate with the racketeering of the police. The key characters — Madame Diana, Peachum, Lockit, Macheath — resort ever more to clichés. So does the sleeping drunk who, appearing in several scenes, rouses himself to shout, ‘Long live freedom of the press!’ The amorality and bowdlerization of language intensifies. Peachum at one point protests against the whole trend. ‘Do you at all understand what it is to wear two faces for such a long time, to live two lives, to think in two ways, from morning till night to guard oneself, to masquerade, to conceal some things and pretend others, to adapt yourself constantly to the world which you condemn and forswear the world to which you really belong?’ Fine words — but he too eventually succumbs to the universal corruption, and in a most spectacular way. He proposes to the Chief of Police the formation of a new crime cartel. It is accepted by Macheath, in writing. Lockit is ecstatic. ‘From this moment on, our organization controls practically all of the underworld,’ he declares. The Chief of Police has finally become the chief swindler-in-charge — and nobody else knows, even though everybody serves him.