TEMPTATION
Incarceration, or the fear of it, shadows setting and story; ostensibly free, Havel’s absurdist creations turn out to be their own worst jailers. Reworking the Faust legend, Temptation shows us a scientist who foolishly believes that irrationality and the modern state are mutually opposed: he tries to explain away the irrational in what Havel has called “a grand self-delusion of the human spirit.”
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Havel’s metaphorical setting is the Institute, “a lighthouse of truthful knowledge.” It’s one of those deviously purposeless, Kafkaesque bureaucracies that Czech writers can invent in their sleep (like the one Havel imagined earlier in The Memorandum). But this Institute has a special mission: although, as Havel has written elsewhere, “the civilization of the new age has robbed old myths of their authority,” at the Institute the state itself hypocritically appropriates the irrational for its own ends.
What undoes him is his inability to commit himself fully to either side. He certainly cannot go further and reach what Havel calls “the absolute horizon,” that valiant point at which morality and action meet. In the final scene, Foustka is unmasked as an enemy of the state; the Institute’s director tells him, “You can’t play both ends against the middle and get away with it.”
George Czarnecki depicts the Institute’s fulminating director with contagious gusto, pontificating about the blessings of conformity as if he’d just invented propaganda. As Foustka’s mistress, Shira Piven snaps her lines as deftly as she wields a whip against Foustka. Eugenia Ives fairly corners the winsome market as the trusting secretary whom Foustka seduces and abandons. The rest of the ensemble are bilious caricatures from Czechoslovakia’s cartoon show, who play the Institute’s ass kissers and parasites with artful subversion.
