Prague to stage Havel's first play in 20 years

May 21, 2008, 16:27 GMT

Prague - Vaclav Havel wrote a play about leaving and turned it into his big comeback.

At age 71, the former Czech president and communist-era dissident playwright is back on stage with a long-awaited new piece, Leaving, his first in 20 years. It opens at a Prague theatre Thursday.

'It is the best thing he ever wrote,' said Havel's long-time friend, cinematographer Stanislav Milota, whose actress wife Vlasta Chramostova is cast in the debut production.

The play is a politically tinged existential tale of an ungraceful fall from grace, in which fictitious chancellor Vilem Rieger is pushed into leaving his government villa.

Once a principled leader, Rieger is now a self-centred weakling who abandons his values and gives in to a new leadership's blackmail.

'It builds on an archetypal experience of a world in decay, values in decay, a loss of security,' Havel told reporters.

The work, both funny and deeply tragic, reflects ugly falls from grace during tragic upheavals that had filled central Europe's painful 20th-century history.

Inspired by the leaders of the 1968 Prague Spring movement to reform the communist regime, Havel began writing the play in 1989.

He shelved it later that year, considering the theme 'prehistoric' as the Velvet Revolution in then Czechoslovakia brought down the communist rule and made him a president.

Havel dusted off the long-forgotten draft after leaving office 13 years later.

He said he drew little from the years in politics. But he did not shy away from mocking his own era of transformation from communist central planning to capitalist market economy, tainted with vast embezzlement and corruption.

'No one else has managed to do it in the 17 years' since the fall of communism, Milota said.

A moralizing philosopher, Havel spent 1990s bitterly fighting his pragmatic successor Vaclav Klaus, the free-market-worshipping architect of economic overhaul.

Speculation soon emerged that Leaving's chief villain, a back- stabbing and villa-hoarding politician named Vlastik Klein, is Klaus' alter ego. Havel says there's no connection.

Havel entrusted the play's first staging to award-winning David Radok, the son of legendary Czech theatre director Alfred Radok who died in 1976 while preparing to stage Havel's one-act plays in Vienna. Radok junior's Klein has no resemblance to Klaus.

The director managed to smoothly incorporate what looked preposterous on paper: borrowing from William Shakespeare's King Lear and Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard while occasionally freezing the action to pipe in Havel's recorded comments on the creative process.

Havel looked relieved as excited applause broke out after the dress rehearsal Tuesday.

'David Radok has discovered what I have not even imagined to have been resting there. That is the best an author can wish for,' he said.

Havel had reason to be nervous. The play's closely-watched journey to the stage proved as absurd as his dramas.

Attempts to stage the production at three other theatres fell apart for various reasons before Havel finally anchored it at the mid-size, experimental Archa Theatre.

Havel pulled it from the National Theatre, the most prominent Czech stage, after it refused to cast guest actors, including his actress wife Dagmar Havlova, for whom he penned the lead.

In the end, Havlova walked out of Radok's production three weeks before the premiere, officially for health reasons.

Havel diplomatically expressed hope that his wife will appear in the play one day, perhaps 'in a different production', prompting speculation that there were tensions between cast members.

'It is more delicate,' Milota hinted. 'It will come up later. Somebody will blab.'