Theatre on the Balustrade: Havel's Absurd Stage
Why is it significant?
In front of you is a small theatre with a modest entrance on a sleepy little square. No columns, no gold, just a sign: Divadlo Na zábradlí, the Theatre on the Balustrade. If the National Theatre is the cathedral of Czech drama, this was its laboratory... and it ended up changing the country.
Key Facts
| Place | Theatre on the Balustrade: Havel's Absurd Stage |
|---|---|
| Address | Anenské nám. 209/5, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08500, 14.41460 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you is a small theatre with a modest entrance on a sleepy little square. No columns, no gold, just a sign: Divadlo Na zábradlí, the Theatre on the Balustrade. If the National Theatre is the cathedral of Czech drama, this was its laboratory... and it ended up changing the country.
It opened in 1958, one of several small stages that appeared when the regime loosened its grip a little. In 1960 a young man from a wealthy family that the communists had dispossessed came to work here. Because of his bourgeois background he had not been allowed to study what he wanted, so he started at the bottom, as a stagehand moving scenery. His name was Václav Havel.
Within a few years he was the theatre's dramaturg and resident playwright. In 1963 his play The Garden Party premiered here: a comedy about a young man who climbs an absurd bureaucracy by learning to speak only in empty slogans, until even his own parents no longer recognise him. Audiences laughed until they cried, because they all spoke that language at work. Then came The Memorandum, about an office forced to adopt an artificial language nobody can understand. Kafka's grandchildren, you could say, had found their stage.
After the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, Havel's plays were banned at home. He was watched, harassed and imprisoned for several years in all, while theatres abroad kept performing him. Then, in December 1989, after the Velvet Revolution, the dissident playwright was elected president of Czechoslovakia. The stagehand who once shifted scenery on this tiny stage moved into Prague Castle.
The theatre still plays, and its programme is still sharp. Picture the audiences of the sixties spilling out into this little square at night, arguing in low voices about what they had just laughed at. From here, head south to the river and follow the embankment upstream to the National Theatre, where a famous café looks out over the water.