Audience by Vaclav Havel in Kacanik

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.