Vaclav Havel in England [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 385-398]

HAVEL IN ENGLAND
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lacking in humour. Amanda Murray played Suzanna as being so guilt-ridden
and unhappy that she retreated into an almost frozen immobility. The
pencilled notes on my programme read: "... if they could forget about
their psychology and let the words speak"; "... must play the roles and
not the characters." An exception to this was the Prague-born actress
Edita Brychta in the role of the student Marguerite, who appears at the end
of the play (a forerunner of Maggie in Temptation?). Brychta, innocently
crossing long legs and beaming at Leopold with shining-faced enthusiasm,
played Marguerite with transparent simplicity. Her lines, spoken without
any attempt to give an underlying interpretation, fell on Leopold's eager
ears with beautiful precision.
Claude Whatham and his cast were right to appreciate the serious
intent of Havel's play. Largo Desolato, written by a man just out of prison,
is about a man afraid that at any moment he will be interrogated by the
secret police and be sent to prison. The fact that the man is a philosopher
does not help him to solve the problems in his life, nor in his personal
relationships with friends male or female. But the play is not a psychological
study of this character; it is rather a presentation of issues which arise from
his situation. Another of the notes scribbled in my programme reads:
"[Havel] uses gags & double acts & repetitions & reversals-a particular
genre, derives from cabaret, music hall, silent film." They are techniques
in the tradition of the Prague "small stages" and "small form theatre."
The tradition includes Voskovec and Werich, the postwar Theatre of Satire,
Jiir Suchy's Semafor and many "semi-official" theatre groups operating
today.*
In 1963 Havel wrote an essay called Anatomy of the Gag for the
magazine Divadlo ("Theatre").s He analyzed certain gags from silent film
and saw them as consisting of two phases. The first sets up a credible situation, and we await the resolution; the second phase has its own logic, which
completely disrupts our assumptions about the resolution of the first.
The gag, he pointed out, does not arise from the unknown, but from the
known, it relies on our automatic acceptance of conventions.
At the outset of Largo Desolato, Leopold is waiting for a ring at the
door. The first two arrivals are false alarms, but the dialogue serves to
increase the tension. At the third ring he is sure that it is "them"; the secret
police. The fact that their appearance is ordinary and their behavior polite
is at first sight Havel's compliment to the audience's sophistication; why
of course, we think, the police today are no longer brutal thugs. So when
the Lad'as reveal themselves as two fans of the philosopher, working in
a paper mill, the laughter is not so much at this revelation as at the audience's earlier assumptions; that they could recognize a secret policeman
*The tradition is not of course exclusively Czech. There are many examples of the use of "smallform" techniques in Brecht's plays.