Vaclav Havel's "Leaving' at the Wilma (2nd review)

As the theater season winds down, The Wilma Theater offers a singular farewell in Vaclav Havel's Leaving, a play with a distinctly valedictory feel. Havel has been a presence on the stage of world affairs as well as the theater for more than 40 years, first as the dissident playwright who expressed his countrymen's resistance after the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968, and then as the first president of his liberated nation after European Communism collapsed.

The Wilma has a special relationship with Havel, of course. Its founders, Blanka and Jiri Zizka, are themselves Czech émigrés who were inspired by Havel's example and whose productions of his work have had pride of place on these shores. They were thus the natural venue for the U.S. premiere of Leaving, Havel's first play in 20 years.

According to his generally accepted story line, Havel is one of the heroes of 20th-Century Eastern Europe, a poet-statesman who both symbolized and literally embodied his country's quest for freedom after its successive immersions in both fascist and Soviet tyranny. But in that part of the world, nothing fails like success.

I've long thought of Havel as a marmoreal figure, wrapped in winding-sheets of irony. On the basis of Leaving, it seems that he shares much the same view.

Schizoid continent

This shouldn't surprise us. The nation that chose Havel as its first free president in 50 years itself collapsed only two years later, as Slovakia seceded from what is now somewhat awkwardly referred to as the Czech Republic. Havel remained as the leader of this rump state for another decade, accumulating honors abroad and, in the nature of the case, opposition at home. When he stepped down at last in 2002, aged and ailing, the Good European Havel was succeeded by a bristling right-wing nationalist.

This too is in the nature of the case. Europe has always been a schizoid continent, with aspirations toward unity continually undercut (some would say counterbalanced) by aggressive assertions of national interests and regional rivalries. Its current north-south split over the crisis of the Euro is only the latest example.

The most interesting thing about Leaving, which deals with the former "chancellor" of an unnamed country as he adjusts to retirement, is that Havel actually began writing the play before his own election as president. In other words, he foresaw his own career down to its final, self-mocking disillusionment.

This might not be altogether surprising in the author of Temptation, The Memorandum and Largo Desolato. But it's a far cry from the smiling, 60-year-old public man who once defined politics as "morality in action." On the evidence of Leaving, it's more like the exact reverse.

Henpecked by his mistress

At first, Havel's Vilem Rieger, played with a slightly doddering dignity by David Strathairn, seems harmless enough, hen-pecked by his longtime mistress Irena (the politically correct term now is "partner") and rehearsing the political clichés that constitute his "legacy." He, his family and his staff, including a centenarian retainer who miraculously appears on the spot with whatever item or libation is required, live on a state-owned villa coveted by a sinister new-breed politician, Klein (Trevor Long, particularly good as a Rudolph Giuliani look-alike).

Rieger's parting shot in office, of which he is particularly proud, was aimed at Klein, but now the latter threatens to evict him if he doesn't recant and offer a statement of support. This conflict, and Rieger's attempt to assert a little sexual autonomy, constitutes most of Act I, which is blandly comic at best and desperately slow-moving despite Jiri Zizka's antic direction.

It's not clear, though, that Havel is particularly concerned to write a good play in the conventional sense. The action is repeatedly interrupted by a voice-over in the presumed guise of the Author (F. Murray Abraham), who comments on its flaws, corrects the actors, and in general suggests that it could all be going better. Later on, he invites us to contemplate the existential significance of a stage entirely cleared except for its set, sententiously intoning clichés about Pure Theater.

In short, Havel is lampooning his earlier profession as well as his later one: Life and art are equally "stagy," and either is equally apt to corrupt (not to say usurp) the other.

Prison for everyone

In Act II the pace becomes frenetic and the action phantasmagoric, as Rieger parodically assumes the role of Lear in the storm (in the play's first draft, his name is indeed "Vilem Lear"), and references to The Cherry Orchard and Endgame fade in and out, with Klein gradually assuming the role of Hamm. The play ends with Klein uttering a self-satisfied "Checkmate!" as he takes Rieger's "throne-chair" in triumph; but it's unclear whether he's not simply describing a situation in which everyone— the author, his characters and the world beyond them— are terminally imprisoned.

As a play— part domestic comedy and part travesty— Leaving is no better than an interesting failure, despite a production to which all concerned give their best. As a metatheatrical and metapolitical statement by a historically prominent figure, however, it is of considerably greater significance.

Rieger continually repeats his refrain that society exists for the sake of the individual, a phrase his enemy Klein gradually appropriates and makes his own as he achieves power. This slogan, like any, is emptied of whatever thought it may contain by repetition, but Havel's truly subversive intent becomes clear as we realize that it's the mirror-image of the mindless celebration of the collectivist ideal under communism, and that at bottom both the slogans and the regimes they represent are interchangeable.

The hero's cul-de-sac

This is no small admission of failure from someone who suffered repeated persecution and imprisonment in communist-era Czechoslovakia. No doubt Havel the man prefers the liberal-capitalist order that he was instrumental in replacing it with: A big cell is generally more accommodating than a small one. But that is, indeed, a market ideology speaking, and Havel the artist knows that a prison is a prison, and that the Kleins of the world are as easily adaptable to one kind as another.

But Havel the artist seems to have found himself in a similar cul-de-sac. In a world without heroes, the former hero himself can only wander among stock characters, careerists rising or falling, and the property shops of theatrical tradition, finding no adequate mask for himself. Of all the frauds he exposes, none can be bigger than himself.

Checkmate.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read a related commentary by AJ Sabatini, click here.