Editor's Letter

The Player King

For playwright and essayist Vaclav Havel, the presidency of Czechoslovakia was the ultimate coup de theatre. The tragedy seemed set to run forever after the putsch of 1948, the defenestration of Jan Masaryk, the despoilment of the Prague Spring of 1968, the leaden years that followed, five of which Havel himself spent in jail as a dissident. No playwright would have dared write a last act in which the imprisoned players reappear as player kings.

The century has known revolutions that have been bloody, silent, earthshaking, or farcical and inept, but none could be described as hip. The Czechs' "Velvet Revolution'' is above all seriously hip. Havel and his circle of novelists, actors, and architects, elevated to ministerial rank, are running the country now, rather as if John Guare, Susan Sontag, and Frank Gehry had taken over in Washington. They are immensely dedicated and determined in the face of economic crisis and ethnic division, but Havel rides a scooter down the corridors of power in Prague, and the new uniforms of the palace guard are by the Oscar-winning designer of the costumes in Amadeus.

Havel is as essential to the new Czechoslovakia as the quiet revolution he helped bring about. Stephen Schiff, who interviewed the president as well as dozens of Czechs from all ranks of society during two recent visits to Prague (page 124), found that Havel's appeal for unity and forgiveness inspires genuine awe in a populace hungry for retribution. The Stoppardesque ironies of life in the new Prague, moreover, mask a gravity of Jeffersonian proportions. Schiff was allowed to observe the new president hunched over a desk in fierce concentration as he drafted a constitution for his country. It was perhaps a unique journalistic moment—another piece of theater that Havel himself might have savored.

Editor in chief