Václav Havel has adopted many personas in the course of his long and varied career in public life. He has been an intellectual and a dissident playwright, a revolutionary leader and a head of state. Now, at the tender age of 72, he is preparing to add a new string to his bow. The former president of the Czech Republic is to direct his first film, an adaptation of his stage play Leaving.
The film will star his wife, the well-known Czech actor Dagmar Havlová, and looks set to be an absurdist examination of the life of an ex-politician. The stage version, Havel's first new play for 20 years, was first performed in 2007, four years after the end of his second term in office. It enjoyed a successful run at Prague's Archa theatre.
Havel, who was both the 10th and last president of Czechoslovakia between 1989 and 1992 and the first president of the newly formed Czech Republic between 1993 and 2003, told reporters at the time of the play's debut that he had first started writing it in 1989. Events, however, conspired to delay its completion. Later that year, Havel was to rise to power as the leader of Velvet Revolution that toppled Czechoslovakia's communist regime.
"I was interested - and indeed am still interested - in the more general, existential side of things," Havel admitted. "I was interested in 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?"
Havel's work has regularly featured characters that are seen to reflect the author's own personality and opinions. Leaving tells the story of Vilém Rieger, the former chancellor of an unnamed country fighting eviction from his government villa at the hands of his shady deputy, Vlastík Klein. The villa is located in a large orchard of cherry trees, and the play is scattered with references both to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and to Shakespeare's King Lear, two plays which also deal with the loss of power.
Producer Radka Kadlecová told Variety that Leaving will be filmed in 2010.
