Leaving at the Orange Tree Theatre

Leaving at the Orange Tree Theatre

25 September, 2008
by: Jimmy

Havel's new play Leaving, his first for 18 years and more significantly his first since retiring from the Czech presidency in 2003 opened to standing ovations in Prague in June. The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, the first theatre to stage Havel in the UK, is now showing the English Language premiere. It should be a major scoop, but at the performance I attended the audience's applause was far more weary than euphoric.  Sadly the play is a mess.

Ostensibly it follows the retired chancellor of an unnamed country who, along with his flunkies and family, faces the prospect of eviction from his government-owned villa to make way for a casino and strip-club. Unfortunately it doesn't seem much to lose and this lack of a genuine stake is just one of many miscalculations that fatally undermine the drama, though it is as nothing compared to the fatuous, clichéd and largely unfunny dialogue. What is so surprising of course is that Havel had to deal day in day out, for over decade, with actual governance; with deal making, public broadcasts and private compromises. So what went wrong here?
 
To begin with there are probably too many targets. The cast is large; several have scarcely any lines and the satire is cumbersome (the unnamed country seems to groan beneath its own imagined history). Meanwhile the action is not greatly leavened by various absurdist touches: the cast dance at one point, at another they chant earlier lines from the play, Havel's own lugubrious vox celesta interrupts on several occasions by tannoy to counsel the actors, to explain his own dramatic choices and to muse whimsically about theatrical space and time. But this is not Havel's Tempest, nor is it his King Lear or Cherry Orchard though both are heavily pilfered from. The initial theme for the play, a story of once powerful man breaking down seems to have been swamped by other concerns.

The escape from a life of high stakes, of constant confrontation or engagement with raw power, has fascinated many writers. Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote of the Holocaust that it included 'the pressure of utterly insoluble problems in a particularly intense form... in a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives' and more recently JM Coetzee has described South Africa's post-apartheid shuffle into seemingly more trivial conflicts, older ones; as of one character in 1999 novel Disgrace whose story he writes, 'if pressed into the mould of English... would come out arthritic, bygone... a peasant, a paysan, a man of the country. A plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning' but it is the peasant, not the professor who wins out in his story.

As Freud diagnosed with typical hyperbole 'life is impoverished, it loses its interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American Flirtation'. And one might add the loss of power over other people's lives as well. For it seems to me that Havel touches on a sense that meaning has been stripped away, not just from his character but from his country in the implicit wake of the communist withdrawal. Everyone misses the prospect of violence; what the philosopher Zizek, in mocking Donald Rumsfield once described as the missing fourth category of explanation, of 'known unknowns', the psychological drives we know exist but cannot openly acknowledge.

It is in this respect that Havel's play could be given a favourable reading as a sort of meditation on senility (the leaving behind of sense, of meaning). Hesitant comments and queries are spoken by the playwright into the margins of a trite story. The action is constantly hauled back from the brink of a more spectacular breakdown because madness can only be approached by allusion to other stories of madness, and thus is always too self-aware of the constraints of language and representation to 'let go'. When a cast member streaks across the stage without explanation the audience in the tiny theatre is not sure where to look, or whether to laugh; it's more surprising than shocking, not something they haven't seen before, and it's all over very fast. And then the play slides back to its storyline with the characters quoting earlier phrases: some interesting, some significant, but most impossible to place and impossibly dreary. Isn't this what it means to grow senile? To be trapped in an encroaching web of codes and puzzles that can't be deconstructed whilst staying bound to a tedious story that must be somehow played out? Much of the play feels like watching an amnesiac trying to solve a crossword puzzle.

The production itself probably doesn't help matters. There's an awful lot of gurning and shouting (none of the cast escape the trap). Geoffrey Beever's lead is a typically mixed bag: droopy, pompous, a bit embarrassing, with only occasional flashes of his usually sympathetic stage presence. And I felt especially sorry for Carolyn Backhouse, as the president's long-time companion, whose shrewish role was devoid of a single good line.

Nevertheless, as much as a curate's egg as 'Leaving' is, don't let it put you off catching later plays in the season. Havel's best plays are in a different league.

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Jimmy