{"id":5381,"date":"2009-09-16T11:13:51","date_gmt":"2009-09-16T11:13:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=5381"},"modified":"2018-01-02T09:27:37","modified_gmt":"2018-01-02T09:27:37","slug":"godot-to-the-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=5381","title":{"rendered":"Godot to the rescue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JoSamuel Beckett wrote a play for V\u00e1clav Havel when he was in jail. On being freed, Havel returned the favour. It was the making of a great dramatic double-act, reprised this week by Index on Censorship. Jo Glanville reports<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1982, Samuel Beckett dedicated a new play, Catastrophe, to V\u00e1clav Havel, then a political prisoner serving a four and a half year sentence for \u201csubversive activities\u201d. He had been asked to write the play by the International Association for the Defence of Artists, who were organising a special night of solidarity for the Czech playwright at the Avignon Festival that summer. Although Beckett had never met Havel, he was deeply concerned by the persecution of writers and artists in eastern Europe and was horrified to hear that Havel had been forbidden to write in prison. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that Samuel Beckett made himself heard in this way pleased and spoke to me immensely,\u201d recalls Havel. \u201cIn my eyes, he was a patriarch or father of modern theatre, who dwelt somewhere up in the heavens isolated from the hubbub down below.\u201d When Havel was released the following year, he returned the honour by dedicating a play, titled Mistake, to Beckett. This literary tennis match is a fascinating, if little known, footnote to the two writers\u2019 careers. The two plays were performed together in Stockholm in 1983 and first published in Index on Censorship in 1984. This week, to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in eastern Europe, Index on Censorship is presenting a rare performance of the two works, for one night only, directed by Jo Blatchley, at the Free Word Festival.<\/p>\n

It was Havel\u2019s friend Franti\u0161ek Janouch who first asked him to write a play when he came out of prison. Janouch, a nuclear physicist, had been granted political asylum in Sweden in 1974. He then founded the Charter 77 Foundation, with Havel\u2019s blessing, to support the dissident movement back home. On Havel\u2019s release, Janouch asked him to contribute a play to a fundraising evening in Stockholm. Havel was at first reluctant. \u201cI told him it will be a fantastic announcement that you are now free and you are the same Havel,\u201d says Janouch. \u201cI called him the week after and he said, “Well, the piece is ready.” He told me that I had stimulated him to write.\u201d<\/p>\n

Janouch had also served as a go-between, carrying an exchange of letters between Havel and Beckett. Soon after he was released from prison, Havel asked Janouch to deliver a letter of thanks to Beckett for dedicating Catastrophe to him. \u201cFor a long time afterwards,\u201d Havel wrote in his letter, \u201cthere accompanied me in the prison a great joy and emotion and helped to live on amidst all the dirt and baseness.\u201d According to Beckett\u2019s friend and biographer, James Knowlson, Beckett was deeply touched by the letter. \u201cHe talked to me about the extraordinarily moving letter he\u2019d had from Vaclav Havel\u201a remembers Knowlson. \u201cHe was very interested indeed and very moved by the plight of Havel.\u201d <\/p>\n

Havel\u2019s friend Franti\u0161ek Janouch then had the brainwave of asking Beckett if they could stage Catastrophe in Stockholm along with Havel\u2019s new play Mistake. \u201cWe had six or seven of the best known Swedish actors who did it free of charge for one performance only,\u201d says Janouch. \u201cThe director practically made it as one piece \u2013 so people who didn\u2019t know the plays had a problem seeing where Havel ended and Beckett started.\u201d<\/p>\n

Catastrophe has been described as Beckett\u2019s most overtly political play. \u201cBeckett took political positions, he was against oppression, he was for individualism he was certainly against all forms of totalitarianism and fascism,\u201d says James Knowlson. \u201cBut he had this view of art that it suggested rather than stated \u2013 if you got too explicit then you countermanded what you were trying to do. People might be put off by that and I think he had a reluctance to go into that area of didactic writing.\u201d <\/p>\n

The play for Havel is a very short work consisting of one scene, in which a director and his assistant prepare a mute figure for a performance, manipulating the actor as if he were a tailor\u2019s dummy. He is a dehumanised figure at the mercy of their direction. His only expression of independence is to raise his head at the end of the play. Although there are inevitably a variety of literary interpretations of the work, Beckett\u2019s intention seems clear at least in representing an individual act of resistance in the face of oppression. Beckett\u2019s biographer James Knowlson remembers the writer\u2019s furious response to a review of the play in which a critic had described the ending as ambiguous.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can still remember sitting at a table with him outside a caf\u00e9 in Paris,\u201d says Knowlson, recalling their conversation about the review. \u201cHe almost slammed down his fist on the table: “It\u2019s not ambiguous. He\u2019s saying: \u2018you bastards, you haven\u2019t finished me yet!\u2019 He bashed the table with great vehemence. I was quite taken aback by it — it was clearly one of those things he felt very deeply about.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that seemed to me to epitomise Beckett. Beckett is about going on and persisting and not just about ending \u2013– \u2018you must go on, I can\u2019t go on, I\u2019ll go on\u2019. That is a vein of dogged determination which comes through and which in fact however much you reify or reduce somebody to an object, a victim, none the less there is this resilience and the persistence of the human spirit. and that I felt was something that was very important and linked really right through his work.\u201d Havel\u2019s play Mistake is less oblique — a group of prisoners intimidate a newcomer who has failed to observe the rituals of their incarceration. Like the protagonist in Beckett\u2019s play, the main character is mute. Each work complements the other as a study in the dehumanisation of an individual. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Beckett is looking at a lack of freedom of the spirit,\u201d says director Jo Blatchley. \u201cHavel is looking at what happens physically in that type of situation. We don\u2019t know where they are, but they\u2019re clearly prisoners and they\u2019re recreating tyranny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beckett\u2019s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, came to symbolise the agony of the Czech opposition and when the communist government fell in 1989, protestors took to the streets of Prague with posters saying \u201cGodot is Here\u201d. The waiting was over. Beckett died that December \u2013 he lived long enough to see the fall of the communist government, but just missed Havel\u2019s election as president.<\/p>\n

For Index on Censorship, the staging of Havel and Beckett\u2019s plays completes an historic circle. Index was an assiduous supporter of Havel, publishing his writing and interviews throughout the 70s and 80s. Its dedication to supporting writers under communism was at the core of its mission ever since it was first founded by Sir Stephen Spender and Michael Scammell in 1972. But on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, Havel\u2019s prescience and motivation in writing Mistake remain striking. Even though Havel had only just been released from prison, in ill health, he had a larger purpose in mind when he wrote his play. \u201cMistake was not intended simply as a kind of snapshot of prison life,\u201d he declared at the play\u2019s first performance. \u201cIn its modest way, it is meant to warn against the ubiquitous danger of the kind of self-imposed totalitarianism now present in every community in the world, large or small.\u201d Twenty-six years since Havel dedicated his play to Beckett, the message remains as relevant as ever.<\/p>\n

A shorter version of this article is published in the Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n

Additional research Klara Chlupata and Roman Chlupaty<\/p>\n

Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship<\/p>\n

Catastrophe and Mistake are being performed at the Free Word Festival on 17 September at 630pm and will be followed by a panel discussion with Misha Glenny and Vladimir Arsenijevic chaired by John Kampfner. To reserve a place email bookings@freewordonline or call 0207 324 2570
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Samuel Beckett wrote a play for V\u00e1clav Havel when he was in jail. On being freed, Havel returned the favour. It was the making of a great dramatic double-act, reprised this week by Index on Censorship. Jo Glanville reports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[179,436,4100,1516],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5381"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97178,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5381\/revisions\/97178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}