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Eventually he becomes 'chief liquidator of the liquidation office', a meaningless institution of a bureaucratic superstructure,

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Furthermore, it does not make for good theatre, being long-winded and lacking in humour or any relief

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havel le genius

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But the gestures, the speech rhythms and the sets told the story, and there were some terrific moments when fragments of Shakespeare broke through.

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 exposes the nightmarish and stultifying effect of communist state bureaucracy.

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Whilst I can appreciate the impact of this play - a daring critique of communist regimes and pseudo-intellectualism - upon the audience of its time, its effect upon us now is at times surprisingly different. When trying to represent our world, the performance loses meaning, and comes dangerously close to the intellectual self-indulgence it aims to criticise.

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contemporary relevance to which it does not lend itself.

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What ensues is Hugo’s ability to quickly ingrain himself into the bureaucratic environment of the liquidation office

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The play is endlessly allusive and entertaining to those who can hear all the jokes.

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When trying to represent our world, the performance loses meaning, and comes dangerously close to the intellectual self-indulgence it aims to criticise.

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The play is an important reminder of the difficult times Czechoslovakia and many other European countries were experiencing in the mid-sixties. It is an exposition of the competing ideologies of East and West: bureaucratic and illiberal communism on the one hand, and bourgeois capitalism, a bleak alternative, and equally devoid of spiritual and human content, on the other.

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"ideological nonsense... I just don’t know a play that could ever properly make fun of it here, as Havel did there."

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The Comedy of Errors

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The play is endlessly allusive and entertaining to those who can hear all the jokes.

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And public life is all about positions, as the chess board shows.

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misquotation, pseudo-proverb and bureaucratese

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For Hugo, the elder son, life is a game of chess: a competition with winners and losers. Eventually he becomes 'chief liquidator of the liquidation office', a meaningless institution of a bureaucratic superstructure, and his parents consider he has made it in life.

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Whilst I can appreciate the impact of this play - a daring critique of communist regimes and pseudo-intellectualism - upon the audience of its time, its effect upon us now is at times surprisingly different.

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He has metamorphosed into a beaurocrat.

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he has metamorphosed into one of them.

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Havel wove a web of misquotation, pseudo-proverb and bureaucratese into a consummate language of counter-Communist farce.

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important reminder of the difficult times Czechoslovakia and many other European countries were experiencing in the mid-sixties. It is an exposition of the competing ideologies of East and West: bureaucratic and illiberal communism on the one hand, and bourgeois capitalism, a bleak alternative, and equally devoid of spiritual and human content, on the other.

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Take a public life rendered meaningless by dialectical materialist nonsense, add to it all the fears and lies that invade the private spaces between the characters’ ears, and you have a play that not only marks an era but has a life in it that is still to be relished.