The Vanek Plays: Four Authors, One Character - Tapa blanda

Contemporary Czech plays, along with four commentaries by their authors, are presented in this volume. The plays share the same protagonist, the "dissident" writer, Ferdinand Vanek. When Vaclav Havel first invented his fictional playwright to entertain his friends in 1975, he had no idea that Vanek would be "taken over" by three of them - all real Czech writers. Between them, Havel, Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovsky, and Jiri Dienstbier have made what Havel has called the "Vanek principle" into a public property. The plays explore the "realism of the strange", mixing fact and fiction, levity and seriousness. While Vanek says little in the plays, his silence is an eloquent retort to the falsehoods of bureaucratic language and jargon. The Vanek plays have been staged in many European countries as well as the United States. With the exception of the three plays by Havel, these translations have been especially prepared for this volume. "The Vanek plays" will be of interest to students of contemporary theatre, producers, directors, and anyone concerned with the deep divisions of our modern world and literature's response to it.