Mountain Hotel/Audience

At the close of this neat double-bill from the erstwhile political prisoner, president and playwright Havel, director Walters has his populous cast waltz around the stage. They exchange partners with an antique formality that hints at strong currents of repressed sensual yearning. It's a beautiful metaphor for the works themselves. 'Audience', a 1975 two-hander written in 1975 describing a farcical meeting between an increasingly inebriated brewery foreman and an unhappy barrel-rolling intellectual is so heavily structured as to feel alienating, though the complete absurdism of communist rule is laid beautifully bare in Beevers's unhurried production. Like 'Mountain Hotel' it is a quintessentially deadening and depressing portraits of the impossibility of honesty and fulfilment under an oppressive regime, of any ilk. Together they form a passionate plea for the preservation of individual lives, loves and personal judgement.