Michal Hecht

"What was going on during communism, I think the whole West kind of knew about the whole Eastern Bloc, what it was like here, and those who were a little bit empathetic tried to help us so that Czech people who came out would have a good start and so on. And it worked in Finland as well, there were very helpful people who helped some refugees and so on. Well, but the moment it turned round, or not, but, again, on the contrary, at that time everybody knew Václav Havel. He was truly a remarkable personality, so when I mentioned somewhere that I was Czech, people would say, ‚Oh, Havel, yes.' And everybody knew everything about him, and you can say that at that time our country was generally known worldwide."

"Then when I started doing theatre, that's where it made the biggest impact on me. Because at first I was doing spoken theatre. And every actor is trying, even if it was really just amateur, simple, but just trying to tell some idea to the nation. And at that time there was total censorship, that actually everything we wanted to say had to be checked, approved by somebody. And a lot of things that didn't mean anything were cut out. And so it was all a game of getting some words into the text, so that the censors would let it go, but at the same time the audience understood that there was a secret. Well, and that had the greatest resonance of success afterwards on stage. So we played with that. And then I came to the conclusion that it was nice to play like that, but it would be much better to do theatre freely. And so like all my life, or all my life at this stage, I started thinking I'd rather do theatre abroad. Especially when I was doing pantomime, I had no language barrier and I had that opportunity."