Vaclac Havel RIP

Václav Havel: a major dramatist as well as a major politician

Havel will be remembered as a courageous world leader – but we shouldn't forget his subversive satires of Czech communist life


Havel answers journalists' questions during the shooting of his film Leaving in 2010, near Prague. Photograph: Michal Cizek/AFP/Getty Images

How good a dramatist was Václav Havel? Undeniably one with a wry, sceptical, highly original voice. But he defied the easy labels we love to slap on writers. Just as Latin American novelists often claim that what we term "magic realism" is for them a truthful picture of life, so Havel made nonsense of the "absurdist" category to which he was sometimes consigned by critics. His plays are not a cry of protest against a meaningless universe. "The ultimate aim of Havel's plays," as translator Vera Blackwell wrote, "is the improvement of man's lot through the improvement of human institutions."

Like many people in Britain, I first became aware of Havel through his play The Memorandum, written in 1965 and broadcast soon after on BBC radio and television. I had never encountered anything quite like it: a merciless satire on the use of language to enforce rigid conformity. The premise is that the state wishes to institute a synthetic language called "Ptydepe" that will eliminate the ambiguities of everyday speech. But, as "Ptydepe" starts to acquire its own emotional overtones, it too has to be replaced by another state-created language, "Chorukor", which will erase still further the differences between words. To many critics, this seemed a classically absurdist conundrum – but, as some have noted, it had its roots in Havel's own experience of Czech communism.

And the more we in Britain got to know of Havel, the more we realised that his plays offered a subversive social critique. It was at the Orange Tree in Richmond, which has staged 12 Havel productions over the last 40 years, that the range of his work became apparent. It was there that we first saw the Vanek plays, named after their autobiographical leading character, which offer a vivid picture of Czech life as Havel knew it.

At one point in the 1970s, unable to get his plays staged, Havel was employed stacking empty beer barrels; in Audience (1975) we see a brewery boss, required by the state to inform on all his employees, begging Vanek/Havel to get him out of a hole by supplying self-incriminating evidence – a scenario that is both satirically comic and bleakly accurate. In the comparably sharp Private View, which dates from the same year, the Vanek figure is invited to dinner by a materialist middle-class couple who accuse him of rampant egotism in refusing to make the concessions necessary to enjoy a privileged life.

Not all Havel's early plays achieved such mastery. Only a few months ago the Orange Tree gave the British premiere of The Conspirators: a somewhat wordy, repetitive piece about the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy, which Havel himself admitted was "clearly the weakest of my plays." But in the 1980s, after his release from prison, Havel wrote two works that again show his ability to catch the temper of the times. 1985's Temptation is a witty variation on the Faust legend that deals with shifting definitions of truth in an autocratic society. And Largo Desolato, translated by Tom Stoppard, is a savagely comic account of a Vanek-like writer being teased and toyed with by the secret police.

The relationship between Havel and Stoppard (born a year later) was more than simply professional. For the younger man, Havel was a mixture of friend, mentor, literary and political inspiration. Not only did Stoppard translate and write introductions to Havel's work: he once enviously said of The Memorandum and another piece, The Garden Party, "these are my plays!".

Stoppard was also moved by Havel's imprisonment to became active in trying to improve human rights in eastern Europe: he signed petitions, joined marches to the Czech and Soviet embassies, became involved with the campaigning group Index on Censorship and, in plays such as Professional Foul and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, directly confronted state oppression. Harold Pinter, who played Vanek in the 1977 BBC radio productions of Audience and Private View, also became a close friend of Havel's through their shared belief in the paramount importance of personal and artistic freedom.

The big question, I suppose, is whether Havel will be remembered for his plays, or for his political courage. But to me they are inseparable. As his country's president, Havel often looked like Vanek thrust into a role of unwanted authority: I was fascinated by the image, repeatedly shown on the news, of Havel wiping his sweating palm on his trousers in the presence of the Queen, as if he fervently wished he were somewhere else. And, as a dramatist, Havel pinned down unforgettably the dilemma of the intellectual faced by the paradoxes of state power. It is greatly to Havel's credit that, in the end, the politician and the playwright seem indivisible.

Among his (doubtless) many other virtues, Mr Havel was a big Rolling Stones fan: