ABOUT THE BEGGAR’S OPERA

Drawing on The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay, written in 1728, Václav Havel created his own version of the play two and a half centuries later, in Czechoslovakia. Using the milieu of the English underworld of the 18th century, he re-examines the themes of love, honour, honesty, loyalty and betrayal in a completely different socio-political context. Hunger, crime, laws, courts and punishments – which apply only to the poor – the collusion between the police and criminals, corrupt authorities, and disenfranchised, invisible ordinary people who endure terror with their heads bowed are, unfortunately, not merely characteristics of Gay’s or Havel’s time.

On the cover of the American edition of Havel’s The Beggar’s Opera is a sentence by Miloš Forman: “Anyone who wants to understand why it is so easy for people in positions of power to abuse their fellow citizens should read this book.”

Although there is a statement attributed to Mark Twain that it is easier to deceive people than to convince them that they have been deceived, Havel calls upon the audience to step out of the comfort of deception, to critically analyse the reality in which they live and, if possible, to choose truth over lies.

Starting from the premise that nothing is as it seems, The Beggar’s Opera, as a portrait of a society in which honesty is in exile, exposes the mechanisms of manipulation, identifying language as the primary instrument of that mechanism. In a labyrinth of dubious social and family relationships, the brutal propaganda of those in power – from the very top to the lowest rung of its hierarchy – uses language as an instrument of deception, coercion, seduction and fraud. The agility with which the characters are able to ethically justify every unethical action they undertake is fascinating, as is the speed with which, time and again, they so confidently contradict themselves, and their willingness to take a position diametrically opposed to the one they held only moments before.

The protagonists’ “soulful” monologues are long, lack a logical sequence, and are designed to prevent any questioning, analysis or doubt regarding the credibility of their claims. The communicative strategies employed by the characters become tactics for falsifying the truth and deceiving the interlocutor who is attempting to arrive at knowledge. In a sociological context, such tactics create a diseased society founded on a system of lies.

Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman believed that people on the social stage behave like actors, taking on certain roles in order to create a desired image of themselves in public.

In our The Beggar’s Opera, the characters and events are fictional, but here too, just as in reality, nothing is as it seems, nor are its actors what they present themselves to be.

The Creative Team of the Production