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Havel will be remembered as a courageous world leader - but we must not forget their subversive satire of life communist Czech

How

was a playwright Vaclav Havel? Probably one with an ironic, skeptical voice, very original. However, defied easy labels we like a slap on the writers. Just as Latin American novelists often say that what we call the "magic realism" is for them a true picture of life, so Havel made a nonsense of the "absurd" in the category that was shipped sometimes by critics. His works are not a cry of protest against a world of meaning. "The ultimate goal of Havel's work," as translators Vera Blackwell wrote, "is to improve the lot of man through the improvement of human institutions."

Like many people in Britain, first Havel made through his work The memo, written in 1965 and soon after they air on BBC radio and television. I had never heard anything like it: a merciless satire on the use of language to reinforce compliance rigid. The premise is that the state wants to establish a synthetic language called "Ptydepe" to remove the ambiguities of everyday language. But as "Ptydepe" begins to acquire their own emotional nuances, it must also be replaced by another language created by the State, "Chorukor" which will erase even the differences between words. For many critics, it seemed like a classic conundrum of the absurd - but, as some have pointed out, that was rooted in the experience of communism Czech Havel

And as in Britain was aware of Havel, the more we realized that his works offer a subversive social critique. He was in the orange tree in Richmond, which has staged 12 productions Havel in the past 40 years, the scope of their work became evident. This is where we first saw the work Vanek, the name of its autobiographical nature, offering a vivid picture of life Havel knew Czech.

Not all the early work of Havel attained such mastery. Only a few months ago, the Orange gave the UK premiere of the conspirators. "Clearly the weakest of my works" a little heavy, repetitive song on the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy, which was Havel himself admitted, but in the 1980s, after his release from prison, Havel written two books that show once again their ability to capture the character of the time. 1985 of temptation is a clever variation on the Faust legend that deals with changing definitions of truth in an autocratic society. Desolato and Largo, translated by Tom Stoppard, is a wild tale of a comic writer Vanek-like being teased and played with the secret police.

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