Is it? It looks to me rather like a hodgepodge of entirely haphazard groups of letters! Oh, this is a very important office memorandum, Mr Gross. Can you tell me by any chance what this is? ![]() “The director comes into his office one day and is given a memorandum by his secretary and finds it’s in a language that he doesn’t understand…” Of course, we never know what it is or where it is, Kafka-style. Memorandum is a wonderful play about a director of some mysterious institute. “Ptydepe was actually a made-up language that Havel and his brother Ivan – like Václav, a philosopher – made up together as a joke. It featured a formal, artificial language called “Ptydepe” imposed by a central bureaucracy for use by employees kept busy doing nothing much at all. Two years later, Havel wrote The Memorandum, a transparent satirical take on the Orwellian-style newspeak he so loathed, and the communist system itself. The Memorandum, photo: Moravian Gallery in Brno So much so that we knew the play by heart and could quote lines from it conversation – and had enormous fun doing it.” It impressed and affected me and many people in my generation. It was two hours of revelations about the absurdity of the system we were living in, and extremely entertaining and funny at the same time. “It was a revelation – nothing short of it. He saw it some seven or eight times, and recalls the electrifying effect the play had on audiences. Michael Žantovský, author of the biography Havel: A Life, was 14 years old when The Garden Party – in which a young official rises swiftly by eliminating every department he works for – was first staged in Prague. And they said, this is not Theatre of the Absurd, this is realism, this is Czech life as it is.” “You might say that the aesthetic, the sensibility of The Garden Party was Kafka meets Ionesco. In addition they brought in Kafka translated from the German to the Czech, ironically, and gave it to these younger poets and playwrights, so that Havel had a taste of Beckett and Ionesco and loved their work. “They brought in smuggled, banned copies of Beckett and Ionesco translated from the French to the Czech. But fortunately, Havel and his friends, the ‘36ers’, who hung out at the Café Slavia, sat at a table and at the adjacent table were poets of an earlier generation. Of course, those works were banned in Prague at the time. “Havel was very strongly influenced, and he is the first to say this, by Beckett and Ionesco. She spoke with Radio Prague some years back about the Theatre of the Absurd tradition Havel was working in when he wrote his first two full-length plays, The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965), while in his late twenties. By the mid-sixties, he was writing his own plays rather than moving around sets and scenery.Ĭarol Rocamora of New York University is the author of Acts of Courage: Václav Havel’s Life in the Theatre, and an expert on his plays. In 1959, after two years of compulsory military service with an engineering unit in České Budějovice, where he also acted and wrote his first stage play, Havel found work as a stagehand at Prague’s ABC Theatre and the Theatre on the Balustrade. Instead of pursuing his dream to study filmmaking at university, in the early 1950s Havel toiled away as a chemistry lab apprentice, while studying at night school and writing poetry, contributing to the literary magazine Květen. The communist coup d’état of February 1948 brought an end to the family’s privileged position. Theater on the Balustrade, photo: Aktron, CC BY-SA 3.0 His maternal grandfather was a Czechoslovak ambassador his paternal grandfather, an architect, designed Lucerna Palace his father, a property developer, built the Barrandov Terraces overlooking the Vltava River, next to the now famous film studios, founded by Havel’s uncle. Havel was born in 1936 into a wealthy, cultured family. ![]() Or that Havel would be compelled to remain the “nation’s conscience”, albeit as a writer of political speeches, not plays, for nearly two more decades. ![]() ![]() At the time, of course, no one could have imagined that the “dissident playwright” would, a few years later, become Czechoslovakia’s first post-communist president. – Václav Havel, there, in an interview with the BBC that aired in September 1986. ‘But, at the last moment, I hold my scream, swallow it, and remind myself of what I was once told: “Man’s real trial is not in fulfilling the task he gave himself but in fulfilling the role given to him by fate.” It’s hard to say what fate we brought upon ourselves.’ Or, “You cannot expect hope to be delivered to you by some professional hope suppliers – you must look for it inside yourselves”. I only want to do what other writers do – tell the truth”. ‘I confess that sometimes I feel like screaming, “I don’t want to play the part of a nation’s conscience. Václav Havel in 1965, photo: Jaroslav Krejčí/Jaroslav Krejčí dědicové, CC BY-SA 4.0
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