Garden Party and Other Plays Book

Started for this book group.

All unquestionably interesting as historical artefacts, as drama some of Vaclav Havel's plays have aged better than others. In general, Theatre of the Absurd appears very unfashionable at the moment and it's a rare sighting except at large festivals like Edinburgh.

Reading these plays outside academia, there are few resources: the odd article on Havel, occasional reviews of performances, but films or detailed commentary are absent. This edition has no introduction nor footnotes.

The Garden Party
In a Kafkaesque environment conveyed by repetitive dialogue and a confused sense of time, Hugo successfully climbs the Czechoslovakian civil service ladder, at some cost to his personal identity. It still has the potential to chime with the modern corporate or public sector environment, though the sense of boredom and slow fear situates it historically.

The Memorandum
For the modern reader, this could have made a better short story than a play, perhaps. Attempts to impose a new, synthetic language to control and improve civil service communication lead to interpersonal machinations and absurd contradictions. Sometimes augh-out-loud funny, but also marked by long polemic speeches. The length of this play creates greater emotional involvement with the characters; if the work were shorter they could have ended up simply being symbols.

The Increased Difficulty of Concentration
Inventive farce about a philandering sociology professor and a team who try to interview him using a malfunctioning early computer. It's a transparent metaphor for the party machine, but manages to be entertaining of itself. I couldn't help wondering how much of Havel the womaniser makes up Prof. Huml.

Audience
The best, most modern and most accessible of these plays. Evidently it's closely based on the period when the Communist Party sent Havel to work in a brewery: this is a two-man play featuring the Mary-Sue, Vanek, and a Foreman. Conversation is natural (though with a few instances of absurdist repetition): banter is traded, the foreman drunkenly tries to talk Vanek into introducing him to an attractive actress, class resentments are aired without ever seeming forced. It felt like real insight into people in 1970's Czechoslovakia.

Unveiling
Vanek is invited to the newly decorated flat of a couple of friends whose pretentious concerns with fashion rival any 2000's hipsters. Havel is making the point that people should be concerned with important political issues, not cultural innovations, but he fails to understand the other perspective, the fear that may drive escapism, and the question of present quality of life. I have some sympathy with the hipster couple, though the later dialogue Havel gives them emphatically makes them look foolish.

Protest
Again Havel rails against intelligent people who have a different approach to life under the Communist regime. Stanek is also a playwright, more successful and working for television; he sympathises privately with Vanek's views but publicly compromises in order to make a good living for himself and his family.

Mistake
Finally, this is a different beast all together: an aggressive symbolic short scene set in a prison

There is a serious shortage of strong, active and sympathetic female characters here - Anna Balcar in Difficulty of Concentration is the only one who stands out. It's somewhat disappointing given the outsider nature of these pieces, and contributes to the dated feel of some of the plays. And inevitably one wonders to what extent this relates to Havel's own attitudes to women - though it is very plausible they changed in the decades after these plays were written.

Havel practically never shows loyal party members as evil, unlike many writers of Communist eastern europe. He was unusually belevolent in opposing recriminations when he was elected President, and he always supported the rights of unpopular minorities such as Roma in the face of a critical electorate.