Abstract
In a letter to Samuel Beckett written in April 1983, six weeks after his release, the Czech dramatist Václav Havel described ‘the shock I experienced during my time in prison when, on the occasion of one of her one-hour visits allowed four times a year, my wife told me in the presence of an obtuse warder that at Avignon there took place a night of solidarity with me, and that you took the opportunity to write, and to make public for the first time, your play Catastrophe. For a long time afterwards there accompanied me in prison a great joy and emotion and helped to live on amidst all the dirt and baseness'.
When he came out, Václav Havel wrote a similarly short piece, Mistake, as a response to the play Samuel Beckett had dedicated to him. While Catastrophe had its first performance at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 1982, both plays were produced as a double bill at the Stockholm Stadsteater on 29 November 1983, as part of an ‘evening of solidarity’ with Havel and his fellow-members of the Charter 77 human rights movement in Czechoslovakia. The text of Catastrophe will appear in a collection of Beckett's shorter pieces, to be published by Faber in London in June this year.
We are delighted to be the first to print both these plays, and we would like to thank Samuel Beckett, Faber & Faber, and Rowohlt Theater Verlag for giving us permission to do so.