Vaclav Havel to Premiere New Play This Season

It has just been recently announced that Vaclav Havel, the former President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic will be returning to his first love, the theatre, for the first time in 18 years when a new play of his called Leaving will make its international debut sometime this year at a theatre in Prague that has yet to be determined.

The 70 year old Havel wrote the play during a recent stint as Artist in Residence at Columbia University in New York. Havel has been coy about the new play's contents, but it is rumored to contain Shakespearean themes and revolves around a great man attempting to cope with the necessity of stepping down from power. It is further rumored that Havel has returned to his style of dialogue that exposes the hollowness of contemporary language. This time, instead of examining the absurd nature of language during the Communist era, Havel has turned his sights on current automated political dialogue of the day.

It is believed that Leaving will more than likely be staged at the National Theatre in Prague, but apparently negotiations are still ongoing. It has been reported in the Czech media that Havel's representatives are actively speaking with several theatres Prague.

"I have not written a play in 18 years," Havel was quoted as saying, "I do not know if this is not the last one. It is making me quite nervous."

In the 1960s, Havel established himself as the best playwright in Czechoslovakia with such plays as The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965). His Theatre of the Absurd style of drama, however, was not appreciated by the new Soviet-backed regime that took over Czechoslovakia in 1968. Havel was subsequently banned from working in the theatre. He would go on to involve himself in political activism and spend many of the next twenty-one years in prison. He never completely gave up writing drama, and in 1985, Havel wrote what is today his best known play, Largo Desolato, a play about a writer who is afraid of being sent back to prison.

In 1989, when the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia fell, Havel did not return to the theatre; instead he was elected its first President. And Havel would go on to hold that office for the next fourteen years, first as the President of Czechoslovakia and then as the first President of the Czech Republic after the Slovak region of the country was allowed to secede from the nation and establish the Republic of Slovakia. During Havel's years in office, he was quite busy publishing five works of non-fiction including his well received collection Open Letters and Towards a Civil Society. This past May, Havel published To the Castle and Back, an ingenious memoir of his days as the President of Czechoslovakia the Czech Republic.