The Garden Party
About the Production
In The Garden Party, Hugo Pludek is an initially inarticulate Czech youth. His parents despair of him, as he spends all his time playing chess against himself. In a desperate attempt to find their son a career, they arrange an appointment for him to see the influential Mr Kalabis, only to find that Kalabis won’t be there as he has to attend a garden party organised by the Office of Liquidation. Seemingly left with little option, they then take the hapless Hugo to the same party and there, strangely, he finds his feet, gaining fluency and reputation by parroting his father’s proverbial middle-class wisdom and the clichĂ©s of officialdom. Using his new glibness to climb the bureaucratic career ladder, Hugo meets a seemingly insoluble problem when he is placed in charge of both the Office of Liquidation and the Office of Inauguration. The latter is supposed to dissolve the former, but officials of the Office of Liquidation argue that only the Office of Liquidation can liquidate itself, which is a logical impossibility. And so a new bureaucratic behemoth is formed, the Office of Liquidation and Inauguration, with Hugo at its head. However, his rise in the world causes him to lose touch with his initial identity; and at the end of the play, Hugo undertakes a visit to his former self.
Václav Havel’s “The Garden Party,” first performed in 1963, is as a satirical exploration of life under communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The narrative follows Hugo’s rise through the ranks, highlighting the absurdities of bureaucratic life. Through Hugo’s journey, Havel critiques the alienation experienced in both communist and capitalist societies, suggesting that the communist elite often mirror the opportunism attributed to the bourgeoisie. The play employs elements of absurdism, reminiscent of Western dramatists, while incorporating a moral protest against the oppressive realities of its time.
The performance by Theatre Workshop Coulsdon at the Coulsdon Youth and Social Centre represented the play’s first performance anywhere in the UK.
The Cast
Behind the Scenes
Image Gallery
The Reviews
British Premiere of Czech Satire
Sunday evening saw the British premiere of “The Garden Party” a significant piece of biting political satire by the Czech dramatist Vaclav Havel, whose play was seen at Coulsdon in Vera Blackwell’s English translation. The play, first produced in Czechoslovakia in 1963, has been presented with tremendous success in every European country except England and (for obvious reasons) the USSR.
Nova, with the support of Theatre Workshop Coulsdon, presented us with the first and (for the present) only planned performance in this country. It was an ambitious venture that successfully captured the very precise style of the comedy.
The garden party of the title is being held by the Liquidation Office for its staff, inaugurated as are all things by the Inauguration Bureau. Upon the scene comes the young hero, Hugo, an overgrown schoolboy innocent of the ways of bureaucracy, but a master at the art of playing chess with himself. This art has taught him to regard a situation from both sides and to manoeuvre from either as required. Hugo strives to understand the absurd bureaucracy. At first he tries to use common sense, but his suggestions are greeted with horror. How could he question the decisions of the Organising Committee? Anyway actual relative facts depend not on reality but on committee statements. However Hugo soon absorbs the principles of the system and is able to take the bureaucracy to its logical absurd conclusion. He inaugurates the liquidation of the Inauguration Bureau and liquidates the Liquidation Office. From the debris, he builds a Central Commission for Inauguration and Liquidation with himself as Director.
Another Czech hero, Schweik, went unscathed through life with his direct and simple honesty, while the blind slaves of the system toppled. Hugo is equally direct and simple. Schweik was preserved by his humanity, whereas Hugo’s world has no place left for human feelings. Characters may speak of sharing opinions and emotions, but their opinions are dialectic jargon and even a description of an act of love-making is totally impersonal. In such a dehumanised society, the preserving force for Hugo can only be the system and the simple rational logic he can apply to it, so that it is the system which destroys the system. But it would be dangerous to sit back and assume that this satire applies only to Communist systematisation.
Nova emphasised its nearness to us all with a nicely pointed impression of our ex-Premier, Harold Wilson, giving one of his reassuring talks to the nation. Problems of procedure, such as who should correctly inaugurate the liquidating of the Liquidation Office are not without their counterparts in British industry and government. All this came over well, but other aspects remained obscure. I failed to grasp the full significance of the middle-class father, and the bourgeois intellectual son eloping with the maid. With the plays of Ionescu, David Campton and N.F. Simpson, “The Garden Party” belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd which demonstrates the relative nature of Truth by distorting clichĂ©s of situation and language: lines repeated vary in significance; nonsensical maxims, if frequently repeated, provide the security of a belief; and an absurd situation taken to its own logical conclusion assumes its own reality.
Despite its serious implications, it is by no means a heavy political play. It is throughout extremely funny, and Terry Brant’s production allowed a full measure of the play’s humour to come over without seeking to overplay it.
I found it easier to to follow the absurd logic in the second half than in the first. This was partly because the actors established a better flow to the admittedly very difficult lines, and partly because my own mind was more attuned to its preposterous logic.
There were good performances from all the cast, despite the occasional need for a prompter, but special mention should be made of the extremely able performance from Richard Ebbs as Hugo.
Reviewed by J.D.R. for The Croydon Advertiser
Other Productions
