Word: vaclav
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...MEMORANDUM. Director Joseph Papp introduces Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel to the U.S. with this wacky and pointed satire on bureaucracy and its bombast. Robert Ronan is pluperfect as the prissy pedant of Ptydepe, an artificial office language in which "ah" becomes "zukybaj," "ouch" becomes "bykur," "oh" becomes "hayf dy doretob...
...MEMORANDUM. Director Joseph Papp introduces Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel to the U.S. with this wacky and pointed satire on bureaucracy and its bombast. Robert Ronan is pluperfect as the prissy pedant of Ptydepe, an artificial office language in which "ah" becomes "zukybaj," "ouch" becomes "bykur," "oh" becomes "hayf dy doretob...
...Memorandum was written in 1965 by Vaclav Havel, 33, one of Czechoslovakia's leading playwrights. As a satirist, Havel is fortunate to have the doctrinaire rigidities of a Communist society as a mockable target. Memorandum, first produced at Prague's Balustrade Theater, is a witty evisceration of the absurdities of party-line orthodoxy and bureaucratic musical chairs. But no audience need live in a Commu nist country to feel the tickle of Havel's barbs-it is enough to have experienced alienation in the midst of a scientific, computerized society. His main target is the mechanization...
Biting Satire. These days, Czechoslovakia's writers specialize in biting satire on Communist bureaucracy. Their work is in the tradition of Kafka and Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. first introduced the concept of a robot. In The Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways...
Closely Watched Trains is a series of contradictions: a tragic comedy, a peaceful war movie, a success story of a failure. The failure is Miles, a railway apprentice (Vaclav Neckar), who somehow never gets his signals straight. The fault, shown in whacky flashbacks, appears to be his pedigree. His grandfather, a hypnotist, tried to stop a German tank by putting the whammy on it; his father, a railroad man retired at 48, has settled on a sin to his liking: sloth. Now, the boy prepares to ascend the family tree and take the inevitable fall...