The first play in 20 years from former Czech president Václav Havel, is about a politician’s painful adjustment to a new life after having left politics. Havel began writing this play back in 1989, but pushed it aside to concentrate the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution which led to the fall of the communistic government. The play revolves around Vilém Rieger, the former leaser of an unnamed country, who fights for the termination of his own nemesis, the substitute and successor, shady and calculating Vlastík Klein. With several references to Tjekhov’s the Cherry Orchard and Shakespeare’s KING LEAR, Havel has written a riveting play about power and about losing power. Premiered at the Archa Theatre in Prague, 2008, and was subsequently produced in London. "It is built on an archetypal experience of a world that is collapsing, of collapsing values, the loss of certainty […] How come when someone loses power, that person also loses the meaning of life? How come power has such charisma for some people that its loss means the collapse of that person's world?" - Václav Havel / BBC
