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Mountain Hotel/Audience
Until Nov 21 2008
This event has finished
Orange Tree Theatre, 1 Clarence St, London, TW9 2SA
Rating:
By Lucy Powell

Posted: Mon Nov 3 2008
At the close of this neat, satisfyingly self-conscious double-bill from the erstwhile political prisoner, president and playwright Václav Havel, director Sam Walters has his populous cast waltz around the stage. They exchange partners with a stiff, antique formality that hints at strong currents of repressed sensual yearning. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the works themselves.

‘Audience’, a two-hander written in 1975, describes a farcical meeting between a gruff, increasingly inebriated brewery foreman and a pained moralist and unhappy intellectual, forced under communism to take a job rolling barrels. It’s so heavily structured, repetitive and cyclical as to feel alienating; when Robert Austen’s affable foreman finally delivers himself of his paradoxical request, the complete absurdism of communist rule is laid beautifully bare in Geoffrey Beevers’s unhurried production.

‘Mountain Hotel’, written a year later, also takes a single song and replays it in various keys, before descending into total dissonance. Again the dictates of communism are played out as a Kafka-esque nightmare, in which the marooned guests of a remote hotel play out their personal narratives in a madly funny, entirely fruitless, disintegrating loop. Havel suggests no romantic or sentimental escape routes in these superficially funny but quintessentially deadening and depressing portraits of the impossibility of honesty and fulfilment under an oppressive regime, of any ilk. And, while ‘Mountain Hotel’ is much the more persuasive and involving of the two, taken together, this laboured but well-wrought pair of plays form a passionate plea for the preservation of individual lives, loves and personal judgement.