The scene opens on a Saturday afternoon in early July, just outside of Prague. The location is a classic, slightly dilapidated weekend house in the village of Průhonice. The garden is a wild masterpiece: a thicket of staked tomatoes, an unruly patch of red currants, a tůje (thuja) hedge suffering from brown tips, and a rusty garden swing that creaks a warning to anyone brave enough to sit on its metal seat.
The air temperature, according to the cracked thermometer hanging on the shady side of the veranda, reads 34 degrees Celsius (93°F). But the humidity, trapped between the concrete patio and the plastic tablecloth, pushes the real feel into the high 30s.
This is Part 1. This is the "hot" part.
Czechoslovakia in 1963 was between thaws. Stalin’s cult was denounced, but the next ideology was not yet named. Havel saw that the vacuum would be filled by procedural heat — bureaucracy as a self-licking ice cream cone. But ice cream melts. Hence the garden party metaphor: a pleasant outdoor event that, in Part 1, is already overheating into a ritual of empty phrases.
The play premiered in Prague in December 1963. Audience members reportedly laughed until they stopped — then sat in stunned silence. That silence is the cool aftermath of a hot satire. czech garden party 1 part 1 hot
The buffet table is a battlefield of good intentions.
On a wooden plank, a bramborový salát (potato salad) begins to weep. The mayonnaise is separating. The diced carrots and peas are swimming in a sad, oily lagoon. Next to it, chlebíčky (open-faced sandwiches) – those delicate masterpieces of baguette, butter, ham, and hard-boiled egg – have started to curl at the edges. The butter has melted into the bread, turning it into a damp sponge. The scene opens on a Saturday afternoon in
The only safe food appears to be the okurkový salát (cucumber salad) floating in sweet vinegar water. It is, at least, wet. A fly, drunk on the heat, lands on a slice of hermelín (Czech Camembert) and appears to melt into it.
Pavel’s wife, Irena, is fanning the potato salad with a plastic plate. “It’s fine,” she lies. “It’s fine.” The buffet table is a battlefield of good intentions
The first thing you need to understand about a zahradní slavnost—a Czech garden party—is that it is never just a party. It is a theater of the absurd, a test of endurance, and a culinary negotiation, all wrapped in the fragrant, buzzing embrace of overgrown nature. In Part 1 of our journey into this particular Czech garden party, the protagonist is not the host, not the guests, and not even the beer. The protagonist is the heat.
We are not talking about a pleasant, Mediterranean warmth. We are talking about a sucho (drought) that has cracked the clay paths of the garden into a mosaic of thirst. This is the kind of day that makes Czechs, normally masters of the chata (cottage) lifestyle, reconsider their love affair with the outdoors.