New York Times
April 9, 1989, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 2; Page 5, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk
By Marta Mestrovic
Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia's most prominent playwright, is currently serving an eight-month sentence for his role in a political rally in January. Mr. Havel, a leading figure in the human rights group Charter 77, has spent five of the last 20 years in prison on political charges; his plays, banned in his country, are widely performed in the West. ''Temptation,'' first produced in Vienna in 1985, will have its American premiere tonight at New York's Public Theater in a translation by Marie Winn. A co-production of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, the play is based on the Faust theme and stars David Strathairn. Last August, in Prague, Mr. Havel discussed his work with Marta Mestrovic, a freelance writer whose subject is frequently East European literature.
Mestrovic: It must be extremely discouraging to write plays and not see them performed. What impact has this had on your development as a playwright?
Havel: Naturally, the situation of a playwright who is banned in his own country, and has been for 20 years, and who, although his work is performed abroad in different countries, cannot travel to see the productions of his plays - this situation is a very troublesome one, and in many ways worse than the situation of a banned poet or novelist, because on the page a drama, a play, is only half done, and it becomes complete, becomes itself, only on the stage. I know this well from my own experience, precisely because I've been in this situation for so long. I and many of my fellow citizens read plays only as written texts or, at best, as recorded by me on tape, and I am very aware of how often so many things come across badly simply because it isn't theater, because it isn't performed. If the experience of a play could be exhausted simply by reading it, theater would be pointless. It would be enough to buy plays in a bookstore. At the same time, I have to say that over the years I've gotten used to this situation, because in the end you can get used to anything, and I write as though this situation did not exist, as though my plays could be performed here, in my own country. But this is not just a matter of the dramatic form, i.e., that the play is written for the stage; there is a deeper aspect to it. Theater is in a particular way tied to its social, intellectual and cultural home. It is written out of a particular situation, and for a particular situation, for a particular audience, and the situation becomes rather complex when I write a play, as though it were for my fellow citizens, for that audience, as though it could be performed here, but then I have to send it somewhere else, where it's actually performed, and I don't know for whom, or why, what it says to people and so on. So my plays don't have a proper home of their own. They become a kind of public property, performed frequently or less so, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully. But foreign productions can never take the place of that proper home to which each play is bound more intimately, again for many reasons, than a poem or a novel can be.
Mestrovic: How in practice do you get around the lack of being able to see your plays performed?
Havel: Occasionally I have the possibility of seeing productions of my plays on videotape, when someone from abroad sends me the tape. Of course, the videotape isn't the theater, but in spite of this it is extremely important to see it, and it's extremely interesting. There were some attempts to produce my plays unofficially here, and now one of my friends has begun to make my plays into original Czech video films, which is easier than to arrange an independent theater production.
Mestrovic: Do you have any control over these productions? Do you sit in with the actors during rehearsals?
Havel: If my plays are performed abroad, and they are performed in many different countries, I have no contact with the people involved in those productions, except in a very unusual case. For example, when my play ''Temptation'' was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, the director of this production visited me before rehearsals and spoke with me for a very long time about the play, and after the production he visited me once more, together with the actor who played the main role, and showed me the videotape of this production. But usually I know nothing about it.
Mestrovic: Your plays have evolved from being part of the Theater of the Absurd to a more conventional form of theater. I'm thinking of ''Temptation'' in particular, which is a much more conventionally dramatic play than your earlier ones. Is this a progression for you as a playwright?
Havel: For me, it makes no difference which pigeonhole I'm put into. Some to this day classify me among the so-called absurdist playwrights and my plays are considered part of the Theater of the Absurd. Sometimes they're classified among what is called ''model theater,'' though I'm not sure whether this term is used in other countries or only in Czechoslovakia. The complications arising from such classification are not my job to sort out; it's a critic's job. I write a way I enjoy, the only way I know how, and it's up to the critics to worry about what to call it.
Mestrovic: You started ''Temptation'' while you were in prison. In ''Letters to Olga'' [a collection of Mr. Havel's 1979-82 letters from prison to his wife, Olga; published in the United States in 1988 in a translation by Paul Wilson], you described the play you were working on. You said you were going to use a prison milieu and only three characters, who would ''chat about trivialities.'' Was the Faust theme part of your original intention? How did it evolve?
Havel: The theme really did begin to crop up in prison, on the basis of some rather bitter prison experiences, and I tried to work it out in various ways in prison, but I couldn't write anything down, and I didn't know - it wasn't clear - how to approach the theme and get a grip on it. It wasn't until later, in 1985, two years after my release from prison, that I suddenly got an idea of how to go about it, and in the autumn of 1985 I wrote the play very quickly, in 10 days. It is really a very loose variation on that old theme.
Mestrovic: Do you always write your plays in such a short time?
Havel: Before I was in prison, it took me an extremely long time to write my plays. I wrote one play for probably two years; not every day, of course, but I did many different versions and revisions. But after my release from prison, something strange happened: I began to write very quickly. ''Largo Desolato'' I wrote in four days, ''Temptation'' in 10 days, and my last play, ''Redevelopment,'' I wrote in two weeks.
Mestrovic: Tell me about the circumstances that led you into the theater.
Havel: I couldn't study when I was young because I'm from a so-called bourgeois family and such children couldn't study at that time. When I returned from my military duty, I worked as a technician in a theater, but as I became more and more interested in the theater, I began to write plays - before that I had written only poetry. In Prague there was at that time an established small theater on the Balustrade and I was able to work there. In all, I was there eight years, not only as a technician but also in a lot of different functions. I was also dramaturge there, and all my plays which I wrote in the 1960's were produced for the first time in that theater, were written for that theater and for that particular ensemble. I was the closest collaborator of Jan Grossman, who was the head of this theater. These eight years in the theater were the only time I really worked in my profession - when I really worked in the theater and was in contact with it. I am 52 years old and have had the opportunity to do work that I liked for only eight years during my life.
Mestrovic: What is your relationship with Joseph Papp [director of the Public Theater]? How did it originate?
Havel: In '68 I was invited by him to New York to see the opening night of my play, ''The Memorandum.'' This was the only time when I had a passport and could travel abroad. I was his guest, and I think we became friends during that time. Then for a long time I didn't see him, we didn't have any contact, but in the middle of the 1970's he produced some of my plays, and two or three years ago he visited me in Prague. I like him very much as a person, and I appreciate his engagement with our culture.
Mestrovic: In 1974 you worked for a short time in a brewery. In fact, your play, ''The Audience,'' was inspired by experiences there. Do you have an official job today?
Havel: No, I am a freelancer. I live as a writer, but my position is very strange and unusual in our country because I have no official permission to be a freelancer. This very atypical situation is tolerated by the authorities because they prefer that I be at home rather than at some factory. There are probably many reasons - one is that I'm a little bit known, and if I work somewhere in a factory, a lot of Western journalists would visit me there and ask me about my opinions. It looks better for the authorities if I am at home.
Mestrovic: I've read that you are taxed very stiffly on the royalties from your plays.
Havel: This whole question about royalties is very complicated. I receive my royalties from my publishing house, Rowohlt Verlag, in Hamburg, which has the general rights for all my works throughout the world. They send me my royalties, and although the authorities don't like it, there's nothing they can do about it. They've tried in the past, but they haven't found the right way of stopping it, because Czechoslovakia is a member of the so-called Bern Convention, which is an international agreement about copyright laws and other things. If they interfered with my royalties, they would have trouble with this international organization.
Mestrovic: What is theater like now in Czechoslovakia?
Havel: It's difficult to answer briefly, but in general, there are some interesting theaters and some interesting productions, but all of them are on the periphery of the official culture, not in the center of it. They are more tolerated than supported by the authorities.
Mestrovic: Do you see any new signs of democratization at home because of what is going on in the Soviet Union?
Havel: I think that when our leadership talks about ''restructuring'' in
Czechoslovakia, these are more or less just verbal declarations, behind which there is no
genuine, serious intention to change or shift the situation in that direction. The
leadership has many reasons to be reluctant to introduce any genuine changes. The main one
is that such changes would threaten their very identity. This leadership was installed
after the Soviet intervention as an antireform leadership. They are Brezhnevites, in a
sense. Were they to open up some possibilities, open up the window a little, make a little
more freedom possible, then, in that moment,
they would automatically threaten to undermine the identity which for the past 20 years
they've been projecting; they would undermine their own power. Therefore what they say is
a bit of a game, a game of playing at perestroika and glasnost.
Mestrovic: Tell me about the situation of political dissidents today in Czechoslovakia?
Havel: First, I must tell you that we don't like the term dissident, which is the term of Western journalists. We don't like it for many reasons, one of which is that it makes it seem like some special profession - someone is a worker, someone is a writer, and someone is a dissident. It isn't true. We all have our professions, and we are engaged as citizens, so why have a special word for it? It is something which in an open society is considered quite usual and natural.
Mestrovic: Do you prefer the term patriot? Do you consider yourself a patriot?
Havel: I am Czech. This was not my choice, it was fate. I've lived my whole life in this country, this is my language, this is my home. I live here like everyone else. I don't feel myself to be patriotic, because I don't feel that to be Czech is to be something more than French, or English, or European or anybody else. God - I don't know why - wanted me to be a Czech. It was not my choice. But I accept it, and I try to do something for my country because I live here.
Mestrovic: Has your long stay in prison changed your view of life and, consequently, your literary approach?
Havel: I don't think that my world view or my opinions or my attitudes have
changed after being in prison, but of course prison has had some influence on my
psychological state. It is an extremely complicated question. Probably my friends or my
wife can answer that better than I. I think that something did change inside me; I don't
know exactly what. But it hasn't changed my work, my opinions, or my attitudes.