Working with Havel

Extract

In the spring of 2004, I was invited to Prague to direct Vaclav Havel's Temptation at the National Theatre in the Czech Republic. I had directed in a number of European cities but there was something of a frisson about going to Prague and working with the ex-president of the Czech Republic, whom I remembered most vividly as the Great Dissenter against Soviet rule in a city I had often visualized but never actually seen.

On the day Vaclav Havel was scheduled to attend the first-act run-through of his play there was a palpable sense of hysteria in the air. The actors, all highly experienced members of a robust and respected permanent company that performed regularly before the upper echelons of Prague society, had never played in a scrappy rehearsal room for an internationally lauded political icon and ex-president of the Czech Republic surrounded by secret service men. Lines were muffed, moves went awry, cues forgotten, and a sense of a ‘Royal Command Performance’ hung in the air. After an hour or so, the torture was over and the actors sat circled around an appreciative, avuncular, and soft-spoken playwright, being gently massaged with compliments and diverted by anecdotes about his numerous incarcerations, the play's inception, and the thrill of being back in the midst of working actors after an absence of some twenty-five years.