Václav Havel's Variations on the Theme of John Gay's Parody Opera
Václav Havel wrote his variation on the theme of John Gay's parody opera at the invitation of the Drama Club. But when he finished it in 1972, it was clear that the hope of performing The Beggar's Opera in Prague theatre was too illusory. After the gust of freedom in the 1960s, the country was entering the times of rigid normalization, and to present the audience with a picture of a society operating on the principle of total unprincipledness, in which the symbiosis of the police and the underworld creates an opaque system of half-truths, denunciation and corruption, was unthinkable not only in Prague, but in any Czechoslovak theatre.
How eloquently Havel's comedy mirrored the emerging conditions is evidenced by the panicky reaction of the communist regime to the premiere held for the banned author by director Andrej Krob and his amateur Theatre on the Move in a pub in Horní Počernice in 1975. "The Beggar's Opera is one of Havel's most pessimistic plays. There is no place for catharsis in a regime that stands and falls by fiddling itself," wrote critic Dana Tučková in a review of the 1990 Činoherní klub production. Unfortunately, at the end of the game, one cannot but agree with this. It is amazing that the author has brought us to this conclusion by watching situations and characters that we have to laugh at.
