Word: haveles
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...Friday's newspapers treated the event as if it were a soccer cup final. "What is Havel's Play Like?" runs a bold-type headline followed by five stars in Lidove Noviny, a daily not in the habit of running arts stories on its front pages. The business daily Hospodarske Noviny called the play the "theatrical event of the season" . "Sure, the fame of the author ? plays a role but it is an extraordinary experience nonetheless...
...Leaving is the latest in a clutch of recent works shedding light on the inner life of the erstwhile dissident. A memoir titled To the Castle and Back was published in English translation last year, while Citizen Havel, a new documentary about his life in office, has been warmly received at film festivals across Europe...
...Havel became known to the world as the leader of the "Velvet Revolution" that peacefully ended Communist rule in what was then Czechoslovakia, although he'd been active in dissident politics in the former Warsaw Pact state since the 1960s. He served two terms as president but somehow managed to maintained a reputation as an affable, reluctant head of state. In the early days of his Presidency, he invited jugglers and street performers into the presidential residence for "a festival of democracy" to exorcize the demons of communism...
...fact, he began writing Leaving in 1989, but set it aside and completed it only in 2007, after retiring from politics. Havel often said that he hoped to keep his artistic and political lives separate. His new play is proof of how ultimately he failed to do so. But, for many theater goers and readers, that's a blessing. Leaving documents the fall from grace of a powerful man. It takes an uncompromising, knowing look at the greed and excess that followed the fall of communism - a period that tends to be mythologized in the West. As an icon...
...ambitious character named Vlastik Klein (whom some commentators speculate is modeled on Havel's political rival, current president Vaclav Klaus, although he differs from Klaus in important ways) embodies the materialistic, mobster-driven world of eastern Europe in the 1990s. Klein slyly ousts the Chancellor from his government villa, then buys it himself and converts it into a shopping mall complete with brothel. The language makes light of democratic institutions. "A good leader must be surrounded by a good network of think tanks," Rieger says at one point, using the English for 'network' and 'think tanks...