Overview
Ferdinand Vanek, the eternal dissident, is the central character in Private View, in Protest and in this impressive autobiographical one act. Here Vanek, formerly a well known scriptwriter in Prague who is laboring in a brewery, is offered a better position if he will write reports for the secret police.
Citizen Vaněk: Historical background
In 1974, Václav Havel was a playwright in danger of being declared a “social parasite” by the neo-Stalinist regime of Gustav Husák. His plays had been banned and, in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic of that time, you could go to prison if you did not have a stamp in the employment box of your Citizen Identification passport. Havel solved the problem by finding a job as a brewery hand. For nearly a year, he rolled barrels in the basement of a regional brewery in Trutnov and the experience profoundly changed his writing. Havel had then recently finished a play, Conspirators, which he later likened to a roast that had been left in the oven for too long and dried up completely. He noted that “it probably was not by accident that I wrote a fifty-page commentary on Conspiratorsin which I had explicated and analyzed in detail all their complicated intentions and motivation.” His work in the brewery, however, suddenly gave him back the refreshing existential perspective “from below, from where the absurd and grotesque dimensions of the world are always more plainly visible.” And then an incident occured on the job that gave him the inspirational seed for what is his best loved, and arguably finest, play. Called Audience, and written quickly and easily “from the hip,” this long one-act opened up a new way of working in the theater for Havel - it was his first autobiographical play.
Audience features for the first time the character of Vaněk, a former playwright and an awkward and slightly comical figure. Havel’s theatrical self-portrait is merciless and completely devoid of narcisism. Vaněk soon appears in two more one-acts written “from the hip,” Unveiling and Protest, which between them completely sum up the moral dilemmas of the Czechoslovak life of that era. The Vaněk plays were quickly recognized and produced abroad, in theaters all over the world, giving Havel an official source of income again. He could no longer be prosecuted as a “social parasite,” so he quit the brewery and stopped getting up at four o’clock in the morning to earn his inspiration in the sweat of his brow.