Havel, Václav; Divadlo na zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade); and Libor Fára (artist).

[THEATRE OF THE ABSURD IN COMMUNIST CZECHOSLOVAKIA] Zahradní slavnost [The Garden Party].

Prague: Divadlo na zábradlí, 1964. Square octavo (15.3 × 15 cm). Original staple-stitched pictorial self-wrappers; [16] pp. Minimal wear to wrappers with crease to upper right corner of front wrapper; else very good or better. Item #55737

Scarce program booklet for Havel's first full-length play, "The Garden party," first staged in 1963 and presented here as the first performance of the 1963–1964 season at the small Prague Theatre on the Balustrade. While controversially received by official critics, the play was an enormous success, as it was recognized by Czech viewers as a very clever satire on the bureaucratic communist regime, with its own absurd features, which they lived in. "As all plays were subject to official censorship, an outright satire of the neo-Stalinist regime would never have reached the stage; Havel took another route, examining the mechanics of language and power in a decontextualized setting, injecting it with enough hermeneutical ambiguity to satisfy and provoke" (Sirkku Aaltonen, "On translation, censorship, theatre, Václav Havel, and Vera Blackwell", in: Censoring Translation, 2012). The booklet is strikingly illustrated using photographs of the play and examples of Havel's early forays into concrete poetry, so-called "calligrams." It also features a tongue-in-cheek rubric titled "Why we are staging this play," which lists excerpts from some of the negative reviews of Havel's work. Overall design by Libor Fára.

Price: €1,250.00

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