On October 28th the Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was arrested yet again by the authorities, who do not know that to do with him. It was his second arrest last year; and the government is clearly of two minds as to whether he can do more harm to their cause in jail or out of it.
This indecision reflects the turmoil within the hard-line regime itself. How should it respond to Moscow's glasnost?
Havel is Prague's turbulent priest, the one man who will not be silent and refuses to leave. On several occasions, the Czech government has offered him an exit visa and he has had the chance to rebuild his life in the West, free from harassment. With great strength of character, have has refused to leave, preferring to stay with his friends and fight for freedom, even at the risk of enduring the squalor of Czech prisons.
The National Theater, near Havel's apartment, has a significant place in Czech history. It was not the gift of any king or government but was paid for by public subscription as a gesture of Czech nationalism against the ruling Hapsburg dynasty in Vienna. Above the proscenium arch stands the slogan. "A Nation's Gift to Itself"; and in its early days, Smetana's operas were a vibrant expression of that patriotism.
During the l930s, under such directors as Jiri Frejka and Jindrich Honzl, the National Theatre took a lead in attacking Nazism until, after the Munich capitulation in 1938, it came under control of German censorship. It never quite regained its independence after the war, Moscow succeeding Berlin and Vienna as Prague's Big Brother. It had its moments of glory, but productions were confined to the classics or socialist parables, staged in the starling sets of Jasef Svoboda. When the theater reopened, sparkling with new paint, it was the company and its repertoire that seemed most in need of restoration.
Milan Lukes is an unusual man to head a national theater. He is neither a famous director nor an actor; rather a quietly spoken scholar and theater critic in his fifties, best known for his translations of Shakespeare. "They ran out of obvious choices," he dryly observed, talking in the actors' green room.
The main problem that Lukes faces, however, is how to cope with glasnost, which has reached even the staunchest border barons of the Soviet Union, like Czechoslovakia and East Germany. While the National Theatre company may have stagnated in its socialist past, Czech theater as whole did not. During the 1960s a new wave of disgruntled young playwrights started to fill smaller theaters around Prague, such as the Gate, the Balustrade, and the Semafor, whose every names in the oblique Czech manner proclaimed their radical intentions.
Collectively, these playwrights contributed much to the years of relaxation that preceded the Prague Spring of 1968, those few months of premature glasnost under the liberal government of Alexander Dubcek before the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Vaclav Havel was part of that group, together with Pavel Kahout and Milan Kundera. After the invasion, they all became nonpersons - their books were banned, their plays suppressed.
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