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Selected Plays: 1963-83
This collection of plays includes "The Garden Party", "The Memorandum", "The Increased Difficulty of Concentration" and "Mistake".
273 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 1992
About the author
Václav Havel
263 books512 followersVáclav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award. He was also voted 4th in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. He was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.
Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovakia. After the Prague Spring, he became increasingly active. In 1977, his involvement with the human rights manifesto 'Charter 77' brought him international fame as the leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia; it also led to his imprisonment. The 1989 "Velvet Revolution" launched Havel into the presidency. In this role he led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy. His thirteen years in office saw radical change in his nation, including its split with Slovakia, which Havel opposed, its accession into NATO and start of the negotiations for membership in the European Union, which was attained in 2004.
Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovakia. After the Prague Spring, he became increasingly active. In 1977, his involvement with the human rights manifesto 'Charter 77' brought him international fame as the leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia; it also led to his imprisonment. The 1989 "Velvet Revolution" launched Havel into the presidency. In this role he led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy. His thirteen years in office saw radical change in his nation, including its split with Slovakia, which Havel opposed, its accession into NATO and start of the negotiations for membership in the European Union, which was attained in 2004.
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February 6, 2023
The plays are hard to understand at first - you've got to do research for context which isn't a bad thing you just cannot separate his work from the history. On that note I've most likely misunderstood or missed a lot of points - it would be an ideal dream to study him in university and talk with professors who are specialists in his work. The entire book was a journey of getting to know Havel and my first impression: confused ended with mad respect and deep appreciation.
The Garden Party
Hugo is sent to the Garden Party and quickly learns to use the absurd language to become the head of the liquidation office, it shows the power of language and the abuse of language. They try to be against elite intellectualism but it shows that when Hugo is corrupted he becomes just as patronising and self-indulgent
The absurd sayings mixed with nonsensical political rhetoric. "You can't fry chickenweed without a straw." "Dear son! The middle classes are the backbone of the nation. And why? He who fusses about a mosquito net can never happen to dance with a goat." There are pointless sayings repeated to show the contentless rhetoric: "That's what I call a fighting word!"
Interesting concept with Hugo playing himself in chess, changing sides, his dad asks how it goes "badly" he switches and his mum asks how it goes "super!" "Lost here - and won here"
Falk trying to be relatable to show he's just like everyone else, it's no wonder people find politicians to be inhuman/unhuman/reptiles: "I'm quite an ordinary chap made of flesh and bones, milk and blood, in short - as they say - I'm one of you!"
It shows the surface level take to class consciousness under the communist regime. It's hilarious how they have to hide Peter because he looks like a bourgeois intellectual" And the defensiveness or fears around being seen as the enemy "I'm the grandson of a poor farmhand, damn it! One of six children. I've five proletarian great-uncles!" The book really does show that although the structures have changed classism prevails:
PLUDEK: Berta, I can't help feeling that we've just lost a son. But I can't help adding that it's no great loss, since our future daughter-in-law is the child of a caretaker!
MRS PLUDEK: But a caretaker is really the working class, isn't he?"
The Memorandum
There is a made up language called Ptydepe that is a perfect language that eliminates any flaws in conversation to remove "the uncertainties of verbal statements" but to ultimately control language and making bureaucratic language inaccessible. There are bureaucratic paradoxes, you need the authority to translate but you can't get something translated without the memorandum, but that itself needs to be translated, much like the liquidation of the liquidation office in The Garden Party. It also shows how they turn
people of the public against each other when Gross becomes a "staff watcher" and a kiss ass student is used as the model student who's A is made as a measurement of success when the class is learning Ptydepe.
These were my fave quotes:
BALLAS: We cannot ignore the stand of the masses. The whole organisation is seething and waiting for your word.
GROSS: I won't be dictated to by a mob.
BALLAS: You call it a mob; we call it the masses
GROSS: You call it masses, but it is a mob. I'm a humanist and my concept of directing this organisation derives from the idea that every single member of the staff is human and must become more and more human"
GROSS: "We're reaching or the moon and yet it's increasingly hard for us to reach ourselves' we're able to split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality"
"We are irresistibly falling apart, more and more profoundly alienated from the world, from others, from ourselves. Like Sisyphus, we roll the boulder of our life up the hill of its illusory meaning, only for it to roll down again into the valley of its own absurdity. Never before has Man lived projected so near to the very brink of the insoluble conflict between the subjective will of his moral self and the objective possibility of its ethical realisation. Manipulated, automatized, made into a fetish, Man loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself, unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is"
The increased difficulty of concentration
Meh
Audience
Playwright who has to work in a brewery, he isn't a beer drinker and the foreman puts pressure on him to drink, awkwardness of him bringing up the writing, asking about the writing, what he used to write about, giving him shit for being a writer who now has to do "real work"
FOREMAN: Must've been bloody hard for you... Sitting at home... all your life, I mean, nice and cosy and warm... Sleeping late in the morning and all.. And now this!"
"How would you like to be a warehouseman? That wouldn't be a bad job for you, now would it? After all you're an intelligent chap.. And honest, so why not? You're not going to spend the rest of your natural rolling barrels with gypsies.... You could even have a snooze"
"FOREMAN: Maybe you don't think I'm good enough for you.... I'm just an ordinary common or garden brewery foreman..." Becoming more and more competitive and toxic, asking about the celebrities he knew and projecting his middle-management type inferiority complex: "I'm just an uneducated brewery yokel."
Vanek assures he doesn't have a low opinion of the foreman and he's projecting. It just shows the harassment and mistrust where he's willing to give him a job in warehouse if Vanek reveals his "political activities"
Unveiling
This play was all my vibe, my fave, poor Vanek, having to deal with a horny het couple. The status quo isn't just instructing how to be an individual, making standards on what a person should be, and shaming any deviance e.g. making Vanek's wife seem inferior to Vera. The status quo is also about heteronormativity; the social constructs of what a relationship should be. The couple are egoic individuals who become a superego. If they aren't succeeding in the status quo they've failed. The shaming, policing and monitoring of each other's behaviour, the social hostility if you're not conforming. The entire point of inviting him over is to perform the perfect heterosexual married couple with house renovations with fancy material possessions, and an ideal sex life. It's virtue hoarding. And it isn't real.
They list everything they've done FOR him: Vera making groombles, Michael buying expensive whisky, playing the records that came halfway across Europe (which is classic cringe flex, love that Havel used it), Vera getting her hair done, dressed up, in make-up with perfume.
"Why do you think we fixed this place up like this anyway? What do you think we're doing all this for? For ourselves?"
It actually shows how hostile people get in their miserable maintenance of the status quo... Ferdinand's just tryna chill and they're out the gate. And then they put on music and it's like nothing happened
Protest
Kafkaesque vibe where Vanek wants Stanek to sign a petition to release Javurek and finds they both have same intentions but Vanek doesn't want to manipulate Stanek. Vanek is humble and non-intrusive - he doesn't want to enforce his ideas onto others and doesn't have a superiority complex about being a dissident.
"STANEK: Look here, if I've - willy nilly - got used to the perverse idea that common decency and morality are the exclusive domain of dissidents"
"But suppose even I wanted to be finally a free man, suppose even I wished to renew my inner integrity and shake off the yoke of humiliation and shame? It never entered your head that I might've been actually waiting for this very moment for years, what? You simply placed me oncce andd for all among those hopeless cases, among those who it would be pointless to count on in any way. Right? And now that you found I'm not entirely indifferent to the fate of others- you made that slip about my signature"
Mistake
Usually I hate an autobiographical lens but it's impossible not to when it comes to Vaclav Havel who wrote this play after he was released from prison for signing Charter 77. This play is sad and dark and shows the nark culture - interpersonal policing on behalf of state
The Garden Party
Hugo is sent to the Garden Party and quickly learns to use the absurd language to become the head of the liquidation office, it shows the power of language and the abuse of language. They try to be against elite intellectualism but it shows that when Hugo is corrupted he becomes just as patronising and self-indulgent
The absurd sayings mixed with nonsensical political rhetoric. "You can't fry chickenweed without a straw." "Dear son! The middle classes are the backbone of the nation. And why? He who fusses about a mosquito net can never happen to dance with a goat." There are pointless sayings repeated to show the contentless rhetoric: "That's what I call a fighting word!"
Interesting concept with Hugo playing himself in chess, changing sides, his dad asks how it goes "badly" he switches and his mum asks how it goes "super!" "Lost here - and won here"
Falk trying to be relatable to show he's just like everyone else, it's no wonder people find politicians to be inhuman/unhuman/reptiles: "I'm quite an ordinary chap made of flesh and bones, milk and blood, in short - as they say - I'm one of you!"
It shows the surface level take to class consciousness under the communist regime. It's hilarious how they have to hide Peter because he looks like a bourgeois intellectual" And the defensiveness or fears around being seen as the enemy "I'm the grandson of a poor farmhand, damn it! One of six children. I've five proletarian great-uncles!" The book really does show that although the structures have changed classism prevails:
PLUDEK: Berta, I can't help feeling that we've just lost a son. But I can't help adding that it's no great loss, since our future daughter-in-law is the child of a caretaker!
MRS PLUDEK: But a caretaker is really the working class, isn't he?"
The Memorandum
There is a made up language called Ptydepe that is a perfect language that eliminates any flaws in conversation to remove "the uncertainties of verbal statements" but to ultimately control language and making bureaucratic language inaccessible. There are bureaucratic paradoxes, you need the authority to translate but you can't get something translated without the memorandum, but that itself needs to be translated, much like the liquidation of the liquidation office in The Garden Party. It also shows how they turn
people of the public against each other when Gross becomes a "staff watcher" and a kiss ass student is used as the model student who's A is made as a measurement of success when the class is learning Ptydepe.
These were my fave quotes:
BALLAS: We cannot ignore the stand of the masses. The whole organisation is seething and waiting for your word.
GROSS: I won't be dictated to by a mob.
BALLAS: You call it a mob; we call it the masses
GROSS: You call it masses, but it is a mob. I'm a humanist and my concept of directing this organisation derives from the idea that every single member of the staff is human and must become more and more human"
GROSS: "We're reaching or the moon and yet it's increasingly hard for us to reach ourselves' we're able to split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality"
"We are irresistibly falling apart, more and more profoundly alienated from the world, from others, from ourselves. Like Sisyphus, we roll the boulder of our life up the hill of its illusory meaning, only for it to roll down again into the valley of its own absurdity. Never before has Man lived projected so near to the very brink of the insoluble conflict between the subjective will of his moral self and the objective possibility of its ethical realisation. Manipulated, automatized, made into a fetish, Man loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself, unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is"
The increased difficulty of concentration
Meh
Audience
Playwright who has to work in a brewery, he isn't a beer drinker and the foreman puts pressure on him to drink, awkwardness of him bringing up the writing, asking about the writing, what he used to write about, giving him shit for being a writer who now has to do "real work"
FOREMAN: Must've been bloody hard for you... Sitting at home... all your life, I mean, nice and cosy and warm... Sleeping late in the morning and all.. And now this!"
"How would you like to be a warehouseman? That wouldn't be a bad job for you, now would it? After all you're an intelligent chap.. And honest, so why not? You're not going to spend the rest of your natural rolling barrels with gypsies.... You could even have a snooze"
"FOREMAN: Maybe you don't think I'm good enough for you.... I'm just an ordinary common or garden brewery foreman..." Becoming more and more competitive and toxic, asking about the celebrities he knew and projecting his middle-management type inferiority complex: "I'm just an uneducated brewery yokel."
Vanek assures he doesn't have a low opinion of the foreman and he's projecting. It just shows the harassment and mistrust where he's willing to give him a job in warehouse if Vanek reveals his "political activities"
Unveiling
This play was all my vibe, my fave, poor Vanek, having to deal with a horny het couple. The status quo isn't just instructing how to be an individual, making standards on what a person should be, and shaming any deviance e.g. making Vanek's wife seem inferior to Vera. The status quo is also about heteronormativity; the social constructs of what a relationship should be. The couple are egoic individuals who become a superego. If they aren't succeeding in the status quo they've failed. The shaming, policing and monitoring of each other's behaviour, the social hostility if you're not conforming. The entire point of inviting him over is to perform the perfect heterosexual married couple with house renovations with fancy material possessions, and an ideal sex life. It's virtue hoarding. And it isn't real.
They list everything they've done FOR him: Vera making groombles, Michael buying expensive whisky, playing the records that came halfway across Europe (which is classic cringe flex, love that Havel used it), Vera getting her hair done, dressed up, in make-up with perfume.
"Why do you think we fixed this place up like this anyway? What do you think we're doing all this for? For ourselves?"
It actually shows how hostile people get in their miserable maintenance of the status quo... Ferdinand's just tryna chill and they're out the gate. And then they put on music and it's like nothing happened
Protest
Kafkaesque vibe where Vanek wants Stanek to sign a petition to release Javurek and finds they both have same intentions but Vanek doesn't want to manipulate Stanek. Vanek is humble and non-intrusive - he doesn't want to enforce his ideas onto others and doesn't have a superiority complex about being a dissident.
"STANEK: Look here, if I've - willy nilly - got used to the perverse idea that common decency and morality are the exclusive domain of dissidents"
"But suppose even I wanted to be finally a free man, suppose even I wished to renew my inner integrity and shake off the yoke of humiliation and shame? It never entered your head that I might've been actually waiting for this very moment for years, what? You simply placed me oncce andd for all among those hopeless cases, among those who it would be pointless to count on in any way. Right? And now that you found I'm not entirely indifferent to the fate of others- you made that slip about my signature"
Mistake
Usually I hate an autobiographical lens but it's impossible not to when it comes to Vaclav Havel who wrote this play after he was released from prison for signing Charter 77. This play is sad and dark and shows the nark culture - interpersonal policing on behalf of state
February 5, 2013
Excellent dramatisation of bureaucratic idiopathy in soviet-run Czechoslovakia. [Equally applicable to western deskbound capitalistic organisations. Maybe it's a function of size!] Plays as reading material are not for everyone, but these are good, if demanding.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews