ABOUT THE SHOW

To sum things up, we could say that “Audience by Vaclav Havel”  is more or less the same as “Audience” by Vaclav Havel. We know this sounds confusing but bear with us. The rest of the text is more comprehensible.

In “Audience by Vaclav Havel”, a director of a theater is visited by a police inspector carrying an investigation file named the “Theater File”. But this is not an ordinary inspector; he is a curious type who, before stumbling from one case to another, studies, analyzes, informs himself and only then starts his investigations. The Inspector in “Audience by Vaclav Havel” has even read the “System” by Stanislavski, a book over-esteemed as the Bible and the Quran of theater. Anyway, this is not the core of this play. What is the core of it, you might ask? The play is, in fact, coreless. But, does it at least have conflict, someone else might ask? Well, what can we say: it depends on how you take it!

In “Audience by Vaclav Havel”, the authoritarian state has established a bizarre bureaucratic system, a Babylon tower of papers and regulations, laws and amendments, decisions, articles, annex-decisions and annex-articles… just like some hermetic spider’s web, that is used to blackmail, to set traps, accuse and divest from any position or human dignity anyone that the state wants to, especially the disobedient and those who refuse to join this system.

Whether you have made a mistake or not is unimportant, you will be found guilty either way because somewhere there must be an article, in one of the endless laws or regulations that will prove your ‘conflict of interest’ with… that you have avoided article ‘b’ or’ f’ of the ‘law for…

You want to defend yourself, so you refer to another law, just as the Director in “Audience by Vaclav Havel” refers to the law that “guarantees artistic freedom”, but, nope, it does not matter, because there is always another law or another regulation or even a constitutional article that proves the opposite. That is why the Director of “Audience by Vaclav Havel” is found guilty.

It’s bad, isn’t it? Well, breathe; it is not all dark and sad. There is salvation. All you have to do is obey, give up some principles, and then you are fine with all the laws and regulations of the world…. Because in the spider’s web of the authoritarian state of “Audience by Vaclav Havel”, there is always a reserve article that will help you get out of that situation with your head up high, or there is a clause somewhere that seems completely unimportant at first but carries within itself the supernatural power to exonerate you for all the harm you might have or might have not done!

And if the fate doesn’t allow such miraculous articles and clauses to be found, then a tiny little favor to a state official will do… And then you are fine. The anxiety of the problem with the law is solved magically. You become clean again, innocent. You become a man of the state.

                                                           ***

 SELECTED QUOTES ABOUT THE SHOW

“It was like the ugliest parts of realism were meeting the innocent parts of idealism. It felt like we were there, with them, in the dressing room, in complete silence, listening and waiting to see what will happen next, impatiently…”.  Fatlinda Daku, Kosovo Theatre Reviews 

“For nearly an hour the audience at Oda entered into the substrates of an absurd state through the ‘Audience…’ written by Jeton Neziraj and directed by Agon Miftari. However its relation with Kosovo reality, this play has a universal connotations. The conversation between the investigator and the theatre director can be encountered in many institutional offices. The author together with the production team sting the state and the society as a whole”. Koha Ditore