Havel's amateur recordings of own plays presented at festival

Prague, Oct 3 (CTK) - Amateur recordings of Vaclav Havel, the late playwright-turned-president, were presented within the Babel Prague festival of experimental music in the Czech capital Wednesday.

Havel, then a leading dissident who was banned as an author in the communist Czechoslovakia, recorded his dramatic texts in the 1980s to prompt their circulation.

The recordings also helped him check the texts' quality. He expected comments on them from the listeners, theatre director and Havel's friend Andrej Krob, who attended the discussion evening Wednesday, said.

Moreover, the recordings were made to preserve the texts in case something happened with their written form.

"It happened several times that Vaclav lost some of his texts as a result of the [secret police's] search of his summer house in Hradecek (east Bohemia)," Krob said.

In the 1980s, Havel used a tape recorder to record complete versions of his new plays, Pokouseni (Temptation) and Asanace (Redevelopment), read by himself, and to release them to people.

Krob pointed out that Havel's recordings of his own texts clearly show the pace, rhythm, the repeating motifs and pauses as Havel wished them to be performed. Havel's intonation, too, indicates how he wanted his texts to be handled, Krob said.

He said he himself welcomed the recordings as an effective aid for him while staging Havel's plays.

The Babel Prague festival organisers stated that by making the recordings, Havel spontaneously joined the then punk ethic expressed by the "do it yourself" approach to creating and distributing art.

The festival evening took place in cooperation with the Vaclav Havel Library and in its Prague seat.