The Garden Party by Vaclav Havel
translated by Vera Blackwell
Burton Taylor Theatre, 14-18.05.02

The Garden Party was written in 1963 by Vaclav Havel, the current president of the Czech Republic. Havel persistently expressed liberal views against the anti-democratic forces looming large in his country, and in 1979 he was imprisoned for his involvement with the Czech human rights movement. After the fall of the iron curtain, he was eventually elected President in 1989.

Mr and Mrs Pludeck have middle-class aspirations for their two sons, Peter and Hugo, who are both searching for their way in life. They dismiss Peter as a 'bourgeois intellectual' who chooses to withdraw from an empty social world and concentrate on his studies and romance with Amanda. For Hugo, the elder son, life is a game of chess: a competition with winners and losers. Eventually he becomes 'chief liquidator of the liquidation office', a meaningless institution of a bureaucratic superstructure, and his parents consider he has made it in life. But both Hugo and his brother reject the choices presented to them and meditate upon the chances of a happier, freer world, where love is possible and permitted, and human beings are considered more complex than any theory or ideology imposed upon them.

The play is an important reminder of the difficult times Czechoslovakia and many other European countries were experiencing in the mid-sixties. It is an exposition of the competing ideologies of East and West: bureaucratic and illiberal communism on the one hand, and bourgeois capitalism, a bleak alternative, and equally devoid of spiritual and human content, on the other. It draws attention to the parallels and similarities between these two systems. To the spectator from the democratic world, the play exposes the nightmarish and stultifying effect of communist state bureaucracy. This becomes an end in itself, and oppresses the human imagination (there is no room for love, for example) whilst simultaneously claiming to represent some greater truth, where nothing else is possible. To these ends, the piece is powerfully acted and you go home feeling you have learnt and understood something about this period of history, and its problems.

Less successful, however, is the company's attempt to give the play a contemporary relevance to which it does not lend itself. I personally felt that equating the Cold War world of East versus West with today's quite different concerns of what to do about globalised corporate power, and the language of branding and marketing (or New Labour!), did not work. It does the playwright a disservice and trivialises the issues of Havel's day. The over-intellectualised jargon of the communists and the technocratic language of the then capitalist alternative is not easily equated with the corruption of public discourse today (which, if anything, lacks intellectual content!). Furthermore, it does not make for good theatre, being long-winded and lacking in humour or any relief. Whilst I can appreciate the impact of this play - a daring critique of communist regimes and pseudo-intellectualism - upon the audience of its time, its effect upon us now is at times surprisingly different. When trying to represent our world, the performance loses meaning, and comes dangerously close to the intellectual self-indulgence it aims to criticise.

Stephanie Kitchen, 14.05.02