The meaning of Havel's "Leaving' (4th review)

There is the play and there is the performance and there are the meanings of a writer's life's work. Václav Havel's most recent play, Leaving, opened this week at the Wilma Theater, with the 73-year-old former Czech president present.

After the Sunday matinee performance (May 30), a formidable panel of experts on Havel's work and an equally impressive group of questioners from the audience parsed the layered meanings and political, philosophical and theatrical dimensions of Leaving and Havel's legacy. The discussion touched on matters ranging from Havel's role as a "theoretical practitioner of modern democracy after totalitarianism" to the nuances of the translation of words from Czech to English.

While the play itself cantered around comic, even slapstick moments against a withering commentary on human frailty and contemporary politicians, the conversation afterward became an affirmation of something rare these days: serious, civil dialogue among relative strangers about the subject of politics and core American values.

The panel, titled, "Václev Havel: The Art of the Impossible," was organized and led by the Wilma's dramaturg, Walter Bilderback, and included director Jiri Zizka; Paul Wilson, the translator of Havel's writings (and other Czech writers), who was expelled from Czechoslovakia by the Communist regime; and the Czech-born philosopher Martin Beck Matustík, a professor from Arizona State University. Matustík was one of the signers of Charter 77, the famed declaration that challenged the policies and practices of the Communist dictatorship.

Theater and politics intertwined

Matustík opened the discussion by underscoring how, in the Czechoslovakia of the 1960s and '70s, "theater, politics and moral philosophy were connected." In that context, Havel's writing and ideas were central to the political discourse and actions against the totalitarian regime then in power.

Matustík added that, ironically, though Havel's work wasn't religious, performances and discussions of it took place in churches. Wilson joined in, commenting on how Havel's writing became an "event" that sparked a sense of a shared commitment. Writing, theater and music intertwined with politics, he said, in a movement of "liberation through the arts."

Sound familiar? Of course not, as Wilma audience members were quick to point out. Americans rarely encounter politicians or a president who can read, write and think philosophically, let alone public officials with any artistic sensibility. Havel was all of these, as well as a savvy politician and playful ironist.

Irony, as someone said during the discussions, is no longer permitted in public life. Yet Havel as president combined playfulness and profundity.

President on a motorcycle

Zizka related an incident in Prague when Havel rode a motorcycle around the Communist capital's buildings. By combining theater and literature while drawing on varied traditions of European philosophy, Havel and the Czechoslovak rebellion and experiment in democracy incontrovertibly proved how thoughtful confrontation can overcome vicious, hollow militaristic control.

In this respect Matustík rightfully placed Havel in the company of Desmond Tutu and the Dali Lama. Matustík might have added others, from Martin Luther King to the leaders of the Polish Solidarity Movement and, as Leaving symbolically invoked him, Gandhi.

Seamy media

The play itself focuses on Vilem Rieger, a retired "chancellor" of an unnamed country who lives on a state-supported villa with his servants, cranky mother, youngest daughter and bossy mistress. The drama involves a series of events that include the repossession of the villa by a snarky new vice prime minister and the seamy reportage of Reiger's affairs in unsubtly named newspaper, The Keyhole.

The stage business is intended, Jiri Zizka remarked, to be at once surrealistic and metaphysical. Gandhi takes the form of an oversized gold-painted bust; the political dialogue, Matustík hinted, alluded to Plato, Kierkegaard and many of Havel's own plays. All this, Zizka noted, was in contrast to straightforwardly realistic productions of Leaving in Prague.

One of the play's more clever and complicating conceits is a series of recorded commentaries by The Voice, presumably of the playwright (in Prague productions of Leaving, Havel himself became The Voice). The Voice advises the actors, mocks the author's creative choices and, quite metaphysically, reminds us that our individual thought processes can be wilder than our ability to rein them in.

Rational vs. spiritual

This idea is echoed in a quotation, reprinted in the Wilma Playbill, from Havel's 1994 speech upon accepting the Philadelphia Liberty Medal. Human beings in today's global society, Havel observed (as only an artist can), live with a level of complexity that demands self-understanding and responses that we have yet to learn: "The abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, grows constantly deeper."

In his plays and writings, the philosophical exploration of individuality and social and political responsibility is a persistent theme. As Matustík emphasized at one point, Havel's concern is with "individual self-transformation," particularly in the contemporary era, when new ways of thinking are needed. These concepts play out on stage, where Havel allows for conflicting dialogue of critical and self-critical voices.

Dapper but manipulated

Vilem Rieger is an example of Havel's problematizing of the idea of the individual today. He is a dapper but easily manipulated figure, accustomed to mouthing set speeches in public while privately submitting to the hectoring of advisors, lovers and family. His favorite, career-defining expression is, "The individual is at the center of my politics."

Ironically, even cruelly, this platitude is turned inside out when Rieger's life as an individual becomes the center of the politics of the regime that succeeds him. Then, by the end of the play, his creepy replacement as vice prime minister uses the exact same words.

As Zizka explained, Havel is all too aware of the vast difference between language and meaning. "A villain can say the same thing as a saint," Zizka remarked. For Havel the writer, philosopher and political theorist, language and meaning demand analysis.

Freedom of sleaze?

In a darkly cynical vein, as audience members implied by their questions of the panel, Havel also seemed to be critiquing the very idea of an open society, individualism and democracy. In Leaving"“ or any publication we might read today— freedom of the press means that the public gets to read an ex-chancellor's treacly erotic love letters; and the sleaziest individuals can achieve the highest positions of power and authority.

So, yes, Havel is offering a critique— not, I think, of individualism or democracy, but of uncritical language and careless thinking. Havel's Leaving is as much the product of this history of European thought as it is the prelude to life in a post-national, post-secular world.

Part of the price we pay for our individualism may be the elevation of scoundrels to power. But a deeper and more troubling aspect might be our loss of language with which to fully engage in meaningful dialogue about what it means to be human today. Thankfully, such engagement was achieved for a few hours Sunday afternoon on Broad Street..♦




A second Wilma symposium on Havel, "Politics and Hubbubs," will take place Sunday June 13, 2010 at 4:30 pm.

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.