Havel’s unfinished play “Warning” premieres at Prague Castle

Václav Havel’s unfinished play “Warning” was shown to a Czech audience for the first time last Friday at Prague Castle. The performance was part of the Havel Alive festival marking the 90th anniversary of the birth of the former president, playwright and human rights defender, and took place in the presence of President Petr Pavel. A month earlier, the world premiere had been held in New York with a different cast.

A play born in prison

The idea dates back to 1977, when Havel, one of the initiators of Charter 77, was arrested and spent four months in custody. The first mention of the plot appears in his prison diary.

The protagonist, Ferdinand Vaněk, first appeared in Havel’s 1975 one-act play “Audience”. Vaněk is the playwright’s alter ego, the embodiment of a conscience that refuses to submit to lies, pressure and convenient self-justification. He is also in “Unveiling” and “Protest” from the 1970s. With “Warning”, these texts can be regarded as a tetralogy of the so-called “Vaněk plays”.

The current version was reconstructed by director Jiří Havelka from handwritten scraps found in the archive of Havel’s friend Zdeněk Urbánek, drawing on the author’s style and on the structure of the three Vaněk plays. He presented it as a stage sketch: a deliberately unfinished fragment with three possible endings. Before the performance he told the audience about the condition of the text that was found and showed images of the manuscript and typescript on screen. Among the notes were also pages of another Havel play, “Temptation”.

Vaněk and the secret police officer

The writer Vaněk is pruning roses in his garden when a young secret police officer named Šeržík stops at the fence. He tries to persuade Vaněk to sign a document with a warning, so that Vaněk will give up his allegedly anti-state activities. Vaněk, a man of firm moral principles, rejects the offer without a second thought. In one of Havel’s variants, the issue is a deal with evil.

The lines were read by Ivan Trojan (Vaněk) and Martin Myšička (Šeržík) of the Dejvice Theatre, which Havelka directs. Set designer Marek Zákostelecký turned the characters into flat puppets with removable heads, and Havelka, who remained on stage throughout, animated them and swapped smiling faces for frowning ones. The bench, the well, the hoe and the tree with a little bird were flat too. The rural idyll, reminiscent of Havel’s country house in Hrádeček near Trutnov, where his fellow dissidents used to visit him, is symbolised by the song “A White Dove Was Flying” from Bedřich Smetana’s opera, and its gentle melody contrasts with the atmosphere of intimidation.

A coincidence with events outside the Castle walls

On the day of the premiere, people gathered on Malostranské náměstí in front of the Chamber of Deputies to protest against the sudden addition to the agenda of a vote on abolishing licence fees for Czech Television and Czech Radio. MPs approved the coalition bill in the first reading overnight on Saturday after dramatic debate. Against the background of fears for the independence of public media and freedom of speech, “Warning” sounded unexpectedly sharp.

The play is staged in the Riding School of Prague Castle. The premiere took place on 23 October 2026, with repeat performances scheduled for 5 and 6 November.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz