Lost Václav Havel play Warning set for Prague premiere
A previously lost play by Václav Havel, Warning, will soon get its first performance, in connection with the 90th anniversary of his birth. The torso of the piece was found by David Dušek, the grandson of Havel’s friend Zdeněk Urbánek. Indeed, it comes from the same Urbánek estate as Havel texts published in recent years as Notes of the Accused, a 1977 prison diary, and I Hid it Somewhere. Warning was completed by director and actor Jiří Havelka of Prague’s Dejvice Theatre – who describes his involvement.
“David Dušek found out that the text was partly Temptation, the future play Temptation, and a future Vaněk play.
“But Temptation was finished; it’s obvious that Václav Havel was fine with putting whatever he experienced in his first prison term in Temptation – and he didn’t finish the second play, the short one-act play.
“It’s called Warning in his diary, but sometimes he also calls it Šeřík [the name of one of its two characters].
“So what I did was I selected the dialogues that evidently belong to Warning and I edited them, actually in a concept very similar to Audience or Protest or Unveiling [three plays featuring Vaněk, a character seen as Havel’s ‘alter ego’].
“I tried to only follow his lines and not add anything authorial, coming from me.
“But in the end I actually did do that, because the final idea was to keep three endings, because Václav Havel didn’t write an ending.
“There is one dialogue that could be one version of how to finish this short play, and then there are two other endings, just written in one line; ‘other endings should be like this, and there is one more option like this.’
“So that was what I had to really write, in order to finish it – and also to admit that this is just a fragment, a torso, that we were honoured to finish.”
Even if you didn’t write much of what is now in the play, as will be performed, did you feel a great sense of responsibility?
“A very great sense of responsibility.
“But I was lucky, because it actually came in a moment when I was quite deeply studying Václav Havel in 1977, due to another Havel-related project.
“So it somehow all came together. It came in the right moment.
“It wasn’t hard for me to finish it, because I was studying especially the [prison] diary very deeply.
“So it was very clear for me, and I saw only one way how to finish it.”
What’s the performance going to entail? It’s going to feature two actors from Dejvice Theatre, which you’re the head of?
“Yes, just two actors. And the main idea is that the audience will be ones who are actually finishing, or imagining the final play – how it will look.
“Because from us they will get the voices of two different characters, Vaněk and Šeřík.
“And on the table might be, I don’t want to say a puppet theatre, but something like that.
“We will show the possible mise en scene of the act, and that’s all.”
And it’ll be a stage reading?
“It’s really like a stage reading, yes.”
You were only nine or 10 at the time of the Velvet Revolution, but I presume you met Havel later in your role as a well-known theatre professional. What does Havel mean to you?
“Very much. I met him personally only twice.
“But actually much more important was what he did in the public sphere, what he meant for us who, as you said, were nine or 10 during the Velvet Revolution.
“And he’s always a kind of pattern for me: Whenever I’m in a hard situation and I don’t know what is right in some moments, I’m always thinking, What would Václav Havel say about this? How would he behave? How would he comment on such a weird or strange thing that I don’t know how to orient myself in?
“So yes, he means a lot for me.”
The premiere of Warning will take place at Prague Castle’s Riding School on October 23 as part of the festival Havel ALIVE.
