Vaclav Havel comes alive in Jos as 16th theatre festival opens today

By Editor

THE vast premises of the Alliance Francaise in Jos, Plateau State is a most unlikely venue for the mounting of Vaclav Havel’s ‘heavy’ dialogue play Protest scheduled to be performed by the Jos Repertory Theatre (JRT) as part of the line-up for the 16th Jos International Festival of Theatre 2025. The annual festival which has become a nurturing ground for artistes, playwrights and critics first witnessed the performance of Havel’s works over a decade ago. Audience, which is part of the Vanek Trilogy, is a semi-autobiographical narrative in the words of his alter-ego, Ferdinand Vanek. JRT went on to tour the Czech Republic in 2022 with Audience as part of the Creative Africa Festival. Another of Havel’s plays Protest is lined up with four other plays in the five-day festival.

Also, Arthur Miller’s illegal migration play, A View from the Bridge, is headlining the festival opening on Friday, May 16, 2025 to be followed closely by Mark Musa’s I Do (Do I?) and Uvie Giwewhegbe’s This Was How The Day Ended. Thereafter, Havel’s Protest takes the stage and the festival concludes with the Pidgin English adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, adapted by Osasogie Efe Guobadia as Spirit and this will be streamed to an audience in Norway, the birth country of Henrik Ibsen.

Protest is the point of focus here because it is not a conventional play. Rather, it is the feeble attempts by the former brewery Foreman we encountered in Audience who has retired to a life of comfort, courtesy of the government he served faithfully, to grow flowers and write television commentaries in support of the government. Havel is an iconic figure in Czech history and he was repeatedly jailed for not conforming to the communist government and later became the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of Czech Republic. He was a guiding light of the Velvet Revolution that saw the end of the communist regime in the country. The play is simple enough. Vanek has just been released from prison and he has gone to visit his old friend from the brewery, Stanek who was then detailed to watch and report over his activities. But now Stanek’s potential son-in-law, the singer, Javurek has been sent to prison and he is making efforts to seek his release. All his efforts have not yielded any results, hence he seeks the help and assistance of Vanek to organize a signature campaign that will embarrass the state and free his son-in-law. He seeks to justify this intervention but it is to no avail to the cool, mild-mannered Vanek.

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But at the point of deciding to add more signatures to the protest letter, he gets a phone call that Javurek has been released from prison. He thus sees no need for the signatures and asks Vanek to burn the pages already collected in the furnace. The play ends as he offers to give Vanek some of his treasured flowers as a gift for Mrs. Vanek. At the festival in Jos, the play will be acted by the talented duo of Emmixxkrizz Onoja as Vanek and Frederick Obed as Stanek. During a pre-festival performance for a group of students, they acknowledged that the subject matter of the play was very difficult to follow since they no longer study history, hence they are not used to the history of the former Czechoslovakia. The detailed explanation on what life is in a police state and democracy followed and they all agreed that they would rather live in a democracy even though democracy has its own problems and challenges especially during elections. This did not stop them from giving the two talented actors ovation in appreciation as one of them gleefully put it, for the way they rendered their lines.

Protest makes Jos Repertory Theatre a veritable chronicler of stories in all shades and narratives and they are ambitious in that they do not shy away from taking theatrical risks confronting all manner of opinions.

After the pre-festival performances, it will be interesting what the audience says or thinks of the performance at the festival. Protest proves once again that the political and writer Havel was truly in a class of his own both as a statesman, a politician and as a literary figure.