CZECH REPUBLIC:Almost two decades after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution transformed him from dissident writer into post-communist president, Vaclav Havel is returning to his creative roots with a long-awaited new play.
Leaving will probably debut next June in Prague and appear shortly afterwards in the US and across Europe, according to Mr Havel's long-time friend and agent, Jitka Sloupova.
His first play for 19 years has already caused a stir in Prague, however, after he demanded that his controversial wife be cast as Irena, the main female character.
"We are still not 100 per cent sure but the Vinohrady theatre in Prague is trying to meet his demands. It would be great if it works out, and the most likely first night is June 6th next year," Ms Sloupova said in an interview.
"Havel's conditions were that David Radok direct the play, that his wife Dagmar Havlova play the leading female role, and that Jan Triska play the leading man."
Czech media have reported that Prague's National Theatre lost the chance to stage Leaving by refusing to cast Ms Havlova, and that the Theatre on the Balustrade where Mr Havel began his career was not big enough.
Asked about these reports, Ms Sloupova said: "you may put it like this, but things are never that simple".
Ms Havlova, who at 54 is 17 years younger than Mr Havel, is widely disliked by Czechs for marrying him less than a year after the death of his popular first wife in 1996, and has been the focus of lurid tabloid gossip for several years.
But Mr Havel said recently of Dagmar: "she was present when I was writing [ Leaving]. She lived [ the presidency] alongside me. I wrote it for her. I imagined her being in it."
Mr Havel's plays, which often used absurdist humour to highlight the communist regime's power to dehumanise people and trap them in a moral quagmire, were banned when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring of liberal reform in 1968, and he was frequently jailed after co-founding the Charter 77 human rights movement.
When communism crumbled across eastern Europe in 1989, Charter 77's leaders left the shadowy world of samizdat publications and secret meetings to broker a peaceful transition to democracy, and Mr Havel was elected president in December that year.
As the last leader of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic after it split from Slovakia in 1993, Mr Havel had little time for writing until he left office four years ago, when he rediscovered the notes that have evolved into Leaving.
"Havel thought he had burnt the notes during his presidency, expecting never to get back to it," recalled Ms Sloupova.
"But after he left office a secretary found them in some paperwork, and Havel read them and decided to continue. He worked on it when he was in the United States last winter, and finished it in May this year when he was back home."
Ms Sloupova said Mr Havel heavily edited his first draft of Leaving into a definitive version in just a few days. "He worked extraordinarily quickly. He is obsessed with his writing and was very much into this play, spending every free minute thinking about it. It is very important to him."
Ms Sloupova said either the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond would stage the play in Britain, and that translations into English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Croatian and Hungarian were being prepared.
Leaving concerns the traumatic eviction of Chancellor Vilem Rieger from his state villa at the end of his term in office. It includes quotations from Shakespeare's King Lear and Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and, like them, addresses themes of change, dispossession and the passage of power from one generation to the next.
"The main character in some ways resembles Havel but it is not him. It's satire, not autobiography," insisted Ms Sloupova, who admitted that audiences may see similarities to current Czech president Vaclav Klaus and other politicians in some of the characters.
"The play is also very funny," she added. "I think people will enjoy it."
