Theatre and Free Speech
Ambassador Michael Žantovský has worked at the highest levels of politics and international affairs in his distinguished career as a diplomat, politician, author, and translator.
As one of the actors in the 1989 Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution that paved the way to democracy, he became the spokesman for Czech President Václav Havel and political director in the Office of the President. He is the author of Havel: A Life, a biography of his former colleague and friend, published in English and a score of other languages. During his government service, he has served as Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom. As a politician, he served as chairman of the Civic Democratic Alliance and as a Senator, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Security, in the Parliament. He is currently an advisor on foreign policy to Petr Pavel, the President of the Czech Republic.
That theatre and freedom are inseparable twins is no new discovery. Theatrical elements were an integral part of the democratic process already in Antiquity. In Old Greece, civic participation involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators in their performances in the law-courts or political assemblies, both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and increasingly came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary.
On a lighter note, in medieval times, The Feast of Fools was especially important in the development of comedy. The festival gave an opportunity to the lesser clergy to ridicule their superiors and the routine of church life. Certain amount of burlesque and comedy gradually crept into these performances. The Feast of Fools had a profound effect on the development of comedy in both religious and secular plays.
In the Elizabethan times, when theatrical life was frowned upon by the puritan mentality and driven out of London by the magistrates, theatres sprang up in suburbs, especially in the liberty of Southwark, accessible across the Thames but beyond the authorities’ control, until a comprehensive ban on theatrical plays was enacted by the English Parliament in 1642.
All this is relevant to the themes of this conference, which is taking place in one of the most symbolic places of modern Czech national history, art and politics. Of course, the romantic term “Golden Sanctuary”, coined during the 19th century period of Czech national renaissance, refers to the original building with its golden roof, but it is most often taken to encompass the whole National Theatre complex including this modern brutalist New Stage building, liked and despised by the locals in equal measure.
The history of the National Theatre as the cradle of national reawakening and of the modern Czech theatre, as most such symbols in Czech history and in the history of other countries, is both a historical reality and a myth in almost equal parts. The story of a nation of ordinary folks who donated a few hard-earned groschen each out of their meager earnings to help erect a monument to National identity, language and cultural excellence is somewhat better known than the fact that the largest sponsor of the project was the Austrian Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I, in the narrative of Czech national renaissance the man at the head of the tyrannical empire that had suppressed the Czech national identity for 300 years. Other members of the imperial family as well as most of the leading aristocratic families, often German-speaking, donated as well.
After World War I, the National Theatre, along with the new democratic Czechoslovakia, enjoyed a golden period of creativity thanks to a generation of talented actors, playwrights and directors. The humanistic dramas of Karel Čapek were a prominent part of the repertoire. His later plays, The White Disease and The Mother, constituted a cry of warning against the impending threats of nazism and fascism.
The golden era ended with the Nazi occupation 1939-1945 and was replaced by fear and artistic sterility. After the June 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Czech and Slovak paratroopers trained in England, the management of the National Theatre convened a meeting of its members as well as artists from other theatres to demonstrate their loyalty to the German Reich. At the meeting, under pressure from the Nazi authorities, a leading National Theatre actor declared on behalf of all Czech actors and theatrical artists: “We declare that we will always be aware of our allegiance to the German Reich, and that we will fully develop all the resources of creative Czech identity associated with the German culture.” The lights in the auditorium were left on, so that the Gestapo commissars present could monitor whether each spectator raised his or hand in the obligatory Nazi salute at the end.
This should not obscure the fact that throughout even the most difficult periods, the stage of the National Theatre and other Czech stages and backstages witnessed shining examples of artistic excellence and personal integrity against the backdrop of the more frequent mediocrity, acquiescence and collaboration. In the 1960s, however, the relaxation of controls and censorship together with an appetite for openness and risk-taking in many a young artist ushered in a wave of original and brilliant creativity that spread through the whole of theatrical establishment, from the National Theatre at the top down to the multitude of theatrical start-ups in the movement of Small Theatres.
In the events of the Prague Spring of 1968 that followed, Václav Havel played a supporting but important role in representing the voice of independent, non-communist Czech intelligentsia, first supporting the reforms and later protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, launched by the Soviets to suppress the reform process. This role earned the playwright who was by then already world famous, both lasting respect in the eyes of many of his fellow citizens but also a ban in all Czech theatres for the next twenty years.
For Václav Havel, theatre was not only a reflection of life (and society) but rather a parallel form of life, autonomous, yet connected to the society outside.
As he wrote at the time, “theatre does not have to be just a factory for the production of plays or, if you like, a mechanical sum of its plays, directors, actors, ticket sellers, auditoriums, and audiences; it must be something more: a living spiritual and intellectual focus, a place for social self awareness, a vanishing point where all the lines of force of the age meet, a seismograph of the times, a space, an area of freedom, an instrument of human liberation”. For the remainder of his life, Havel pursued these themes, mostly as comedies of the absurd on the stage, as a profound and original essayist in his writings, as a human rights defender and activist in his civic activities, and ultimately in his political activities as president.
The age of normalisation following the Soviet invasion once again completely changed the face of the Czech and Slovak theatre. Prague, with a number of small avant garde theatre, and an even larger number of rebellious authors, directors and playwrights, including Václav Havel, Josef Topol, Karel Steigerwald, Daniela Fischerová, Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovský, Jiří Grossman et al. was closely monitored and its theatre life largely suffocated. The burden of creativity and social relevance fell on the shoulders of regional theatres, mainly in the second largest city Brno. The occasional miracle of brilliant theatre nevertheless broke all national, cultural and regional barriers. The popular Monday weekly broadcast of a theatre production on Czech TV consisted almost exclusively of performances by Slovak theatres and actors, giving the lie to a tedious nonsense that some people will never tire of spreading, about the two languages being so different that we cannot understand each other.
But the most important Havel’s work of the 1970s was not a play but rather a human rights petition, in itself provoked by another government assault on culture and artists, this time on a long-haired underground rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe. In an essay, symptomatically called The Trial, Havel who had been present at the totally absurd court proceedings with the group.
Naturally, something born out of an absurd spectacle could only lead to another even more absurd experience. In the next few weeks, at the behest of the government, thousands and thousands of unsuspecting actors, musicians, scientists and writers were herded into meetings held for the specific purpose of condemning this outrage, a petition advocating freedom of expression for the “washouts and the self appointees”, a petition that those who participated in the meetings were not even allowed to read themselves.
And so the story repeated itself. Any instance of free expression, spontaneity and creativity was instantly recognised, suppressed, prosecuted and punished by a system that tolerates no freedom, no spontaneity and no creativity, to be replaced by inanities, truisms and empty phrases posing as art. But it is eventually all in vain because such products are instantly recognisable as artificial, construed and fraudulent. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress its fledgling reforms, the English poet W.H. Auden wrote a poem, August 1968, consisting of eight simple verses:
The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for man, But one prize is beyond its reach, The Ogre cannot master speech About a subjugated plain
Among its desperate and slain The Ogre walks with hands on hips While drivel gushes from his lips.
It is a lasting monument to the barren nature of the totalitarian system that in twenty years of total control over the society it was unable to provide public space for a single memorable poem, a single noteworthy novel, or a single powerful play. The few artistic achievements that did occur in public during that time owed their birth more to a lapse of attention on the part of the censors than to their benevolence. In contrast, the underground and samizdat sphere, which relied on the laborious process of producing copies of a text on manual typewriters with the help of carbon papers, or on performances in private homes, farmhouses or obscure bars, or on books smuggled from abroad, flourished with the works of poets like Jaroslav Seifert, Jiří Gruša or Jan Skácel, novelists like Bohuslav Hrabal, Josef Škvorecký, and Pavel Kohout or playwrights like Václav Havel, Josef Topol, and Daniela Fischerová.
Eventually, theatre itself had its vengeance. After a peaceful student march was brutally dispersed and savagely beaten by the riot police 35 years ago on 17 November 1989, a Friday, the organising, scheming and networking that produced a full-scale revolution in mere three days was predominantly done in theatres, by theatre professionals and with the enthusiastic support of theatre audiences. Already on the evening of the massacre several leading Prague intellectuals discussed the best course of action at the Realistic Theatre across the river, and continued there the next day with an appeal for a theatre strike joined almost immediately by all Prague theatres, followed by most regional scenes. As the theatres went on strike, their suddenly liberated actors, directors and producers went on improvised tours as a sort of human social media, to spread the news and the gospel of the revolution around the country. On Sunday, the Civic Forum was founded, an umbrella organisation initiated by Havel to coordinate the revolutionary activities, or at least try to. On Monday, the revolution moved to outdoor stages on the streets and squares of Prague and other cities. And on the next weekend, a million people braved the freezing weather to participate in the largest piece of political theatre I have ever seen on the Letná plain above Prague, where once the largest statue of Josef Stalin the world has ever seen, had held the citizens of Prague in a permanent state of terror with its icy stare.
I undertook this brief overview of Czech history of the last century not so much to decry the hardships, oppression and injustices imposed on theatre by a tyrannical political regime, but rather to draw a positive conclusion. The ogre can use its power to purge theatres and other cultural institutions, to ban plays, books and exhibitions, to make obedient tools out of the media, to introduce legislation to cleanse the national language from foreign impurities, even to alter the music to the national anthem. But one thing is beyond its reach. The Ogre cannot master speech.
This text was the keynote of Michael Žantovský at the 68th Pearle* Conference at The New Stage of the National Theatre in Prague on 22 November 2024.
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