The Reluctant Revolutionary : Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, once out of step, now marches at the head of the crowd

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats’ description of the public men of his time applies to those of our time as well. But now and again we get a Vaclav Havel.

It has been thrilling, these past few weeks, to watch Havel addressing big rallies in Prague, to see him hailed as the patron saint of the current Czech uprising. Times correspondent Tyler Marshall even reports that there’s a move to make him president.

Only last spring, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum offered an evening of readings from Havel’s plays, protesting his latest imprisonment for “hooliganism”--i.e., speaking out against the powers that be. And now their power is gone. How the mighty have fallen!

In the wake of all this change, had Havel been the typical public man, he would have done a bit of gloating. The people have spoken, etc.

Instead he told the press: “My ambition is to be a playwright again.”

You believe him. Not because he is a saint, but because he isn’t one. Making theater is what the man really wants to do. The rest of it--the demonstrations, the manifestoes--has been a necessary interruption of service.

Is this his real attitude? Maybe not. Maybe Havel has learned the pleasures of being a public figure. His last play at the Mark Taper Forum, “Temptation”--we had it in July--was about trafficking with the devil. One of its points was that the devil gives value.

But from what we know of Havel as he presents himself in the theater, he is absolutely sincere. This is a man who craves privacy. Not the isolation of a jail cell, but the comforts of one’s studio. This is an artist who wants to get down to his big project.

But people keep bursting in. And he--poor fool--keeps getting involved with them. It’s the very predicament of the professor in Havel’s “Largo Desolato,” played with such hilarious panic by Robin Gammell at Taper, Too, in 1987. Never was there a more reluctant revolutionary. It’s not that he loves the honor of his country so much more. (All he really loves is his latest book.) It’s that his clever colleagues love it so much less .

A similar problem faces the meek little go-between in Havel’s “A Private View,” at Taper, Too in ‘84--another very funny performance by Ray Birke. He doesn’t consider himself to be a particularly good person. In fact, he feels himself to be suffering from a kind of ethical impediment. He can find reason in the most selfish person’s point of view--to the point where he can’t blame anyone for behaving as he does. And yet, for himself, he’s got to act in this rigidly moralistic way.

This is poor career strategy in a society where the first rule is to go along with the authorities--or at least not to do anything to attract their attention. It can also lead to humiliating results. To be totally out of step with one’s fellows, to no particular psychic reward, is to risk labeling oneself as a fool, even in one’s own mind. It also gets you into deep trouble. Havel’s heroes always end with egg on their faces.

And yet, at the end, the viewer can indeed see them as heroes: little men who dared to take on the system; or didn’t dare to, but did so anyway. Certainly the viewer would prefer to be one of Havel’s lambs than one of his wolves: those clever rationalizers, like Richard Jordan in “A Private View,” who can convince themselves that in the end “progress” demands that they keep their nice apartment and their weekends in the country.

What’s funny is that we identify with Havel’s wolves as easily as with the lambs. Never has a “political” playwright steered so far away from political melodrama. Originally, one ascribed that to the playwright’s own caution about offending “the authorities.” But his personal courage has been demonstrated so often that another cause is more likely: He sees the world as a complicated place.

He is also a middle European. That makes it natural to write in a rueful, semi-humorous vein; to posit a universe where nothing is absolutely black or absolutely white, where a moment can be threatening and comic at the same time, where people’s motives are drastically mixed, where everything depends on how you look at it.

No, not everything. In the end, Havel’s plays don’t simply shrug and walk away. They say that people and societies do have to make choices, and that some choices are better than others. They further suggest that a good way to tell a bad choice--especially one made by someone in power--is to take a sniff at the language used to defend it. The fancier it is, the more it’s to be suspected.

That’s the cream of the jest in Havel’s “The Memorandum,” concerning a government office run by memo-passers recognizable to anybody who has ever worked in an office on either side of the Iron Curtain. Vaclav Havel’s country needn’t have kept his plays off the stage for 20 years. They were about our system, as well as about their system. Now, having helped to change that system, he can get back to his desk. If they let him.