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Paul Newman Narrates This Actors Studio Documentary On The Staging By The Actor's Studio Of An English Version Of Vaclav Havel's Play "The Audience" In A Special Co-Presentation With The Original Czech Version Of The Play, The First Time It Had Been Performed Publicly In The Newly Democratic Czechoslovakia - Presented In The Highest DVD Quality MPG Video Format Of 9.1 MBPS As An Archival Quality All Regions Format DVD, MP4 Video Download Or USB Flash Drive! (Color, 1990 58 Minutes.) #HavelsAudienceWithHistory #PaulNewman #ActorsStudio #TheAudience #Audience #AudienceHavelPlay #FerdinandVanek #VaclavHavel #Stage #Theater #Theatre #CzechoslovakianTheatre #Plays #DVD #VideoDownload #MP4 #USBFlashDrive
The 1975 Play The Audience is the first of a a set of plays by Vaclav Havel in which the character Ferdinand Vanek, a stand-in for Havel himself, is central. Vanek (Czech: "Breeze"), like Havel, was a dissident playwright, forced to work in a brewery because his writing has been banned by the Czechoslovak Communist regime. In the course of the play, it becomes clear that the brewmaster has been asked to spy on him. A long, rambling, comic dialogue proceeds, in the course of which the brewmaster eventually becomes a sympathetic figure, rather than a villain. Since Havel's work was banned, the play was not performed in any theater. Instead, it was performed in living rooms and distributed as samizdat, a form of dissident activity across the socialist Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. However, the work became quite well known in the Czech Republic, in part because of a widely circulated 1977 BBC radio production of Audience broadcast on Radio Free Europe starring Harold Pinter as Vanek. Today, the Vanek plays are among Havel's best-known works. Vanek subsequently appeared in three other plays by Havel (Protest, Unveiling, and Dozens of Cousins), as well as plays by his friends and colleagues, including Pavel Landovsky and Tom Stoppard. Havel used Vanek in the plays Unveiling, a comic one-act about a couple who desperately want Vanek to absolve them for their collaborative relationship with the Communist regime, and Protest, in which Vanek tries to convince an old colleague to sign a protest letter.