The other day I committed a subversive act. No, I did not plot to put barrel-loads of gunpowder beneath the Beehive; I did not threaten to deface the electorate office of a local MP; I did not even hack the Governor-General's personal email account in order to send out fraudulent and off-colour email Christmas greetings.
I did none of those things. But what I did do was ... go to the theatre.
Subversive? Going to the theatre?
Well, yes, and I'll explain why. It is one of the few remaining areas of public life and activity that is the province of free-thinking writers, actors, directors and other assorted creatives - relatively, if not entirely, unmediated by the cauterising effect of our affluent, conformist, focus-group obsessed, consumer-driven society.
It was a Roger Hall play, another excellent production in an outstanding season at the Fortune Theatre: A Short Cut to Happiness. On the face of it, Mr Hall is not the most seditious of playwrights, nor the most confronting. But he routinely lures people in large numbers away from their television screens, their comfortable, unquestioning lives and presents them, in an auditorium full of strangers, with a few home truths about the human condition in general, and our own New Zealand version of it in particular.
Best of all he gets them to laugh about it. Communal laughter can be as political as political can be; cathartic and subversive, too. The admired Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote about it in his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
As it happens, the obituarists have been busy with a countryman and contemporary of Kundera, a figure of almost unparalleled stature in post-Communist Europe: the great Czech playwright-president Vaclav Havel, who died at the weekend and whose dissident writings, including from prison, and his plays written from within a repressive Communist regime, saw him at the forefront of his country's Velvet Revolution in 1989.
In that year, addressing the 300,000-strong crowd who had gathered in Prague's Wenceslas Square, he had become, as Timothy Garton Ash put it at the weekend in The Guardian newspaper, "the lead actor and director of a play that changed history".
"He was not just a European; he was a European who, with the eloquence of a professional playwright and the authority of a former political prisoner, reminded us of the historical and moral dimensions of the European project," Mr Garton Ash wrote.
It seems that an integral part of that project was resistance - in its various forms - to the authoritarianism of the regimes under which a number of artists, playwrights, poets and novelists sought the freedom to express themselves.
Pondering Havel's death, the other night I took from the book case Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll. At a time when reading was easy and there seemed endless time for it, Kundera had become something of a literary hero among my London friends, slackers all, marking time in a food packing warehouse between university and a "proper" life.
Stoppard was up there, too.
Also Czech by birth and originally named Tomas, like both the hero of Kundera's book and the lead character in an early draft of the play, he pays tribute to Havel and Kundera as influences in this award-winning work - about politics, philosophy and the role of rock 'n' roll in the revolution.
Havel, relates Stoppard in the foreword to Rock 'n' Roll, had met a man called Ivan Jirous, the artistic director of a rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe. This band's challenging non-conformism saw its members pursued and jailed by the Communists. Most of the band was released but Jirous did stand trial and Havel wrote about it. His subsequent short essay, The Trial, increased his own notoriety with the regime but also became a disquisition on dissent, consumed widely in the country and elsewhere in Europe.
Of the band's persecution, Havel said it was "an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity".
He went on bravely to challenge with softly spoken determination and a dedication to non-violence the legitimacy of the corrupt and oppressive regime under which he and his fellow citizens existed; and, eventually, with a humility uncommon in world leaders, he stood before them as their president.
Politics had become, whether he liked it or not, his very own stage and try as he might he could not escape it.
I wonder how he would characterise the politics of much of the West today - in all its creeping infantilism and careless disengagement.
Consider the debased nature of our own political-media nexus as exemplified by a system in which, apparently, unregulated text-a-vote following a television appearance can prove a decisive intervention in the choice of a political party's new leader: politics reduced to the status of reality TV, banal popularity contests and "celebrity" potential - with all the possibilities for moral and intellectual torpor that can entail.
To call it theatre of the absurd would be an unwarranted compliment.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
