The Conspirators

Synopsis

The revolution has taken place. The dictator has fled. The new government is in power. But the prime minister's secretary is under arrest and there are demonstrators on the streets and concern that the ideals of the revolution are about to be betrayed. The chiefs of the police, the army, the law and the intelligence services, aided and abetted by Helga, a rich and attractive widow known to them all, decide that action must be taken to protect the fledgling democracy. They must form a new, secret, Revolutionary Council - and just at that moment they hear that there is indeed a 'conspiracy'.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 5 September 2011

In its fortieth birthday season, the Orange Tree commendably digs up an early play by its most remarkable “house” dramatist, Vaclav Havel, one written when he was a banned writer three years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 put paid to the Prague Spring.

This is the British premiere – in a translation by Tomas Rychetsky and Carol Rocamara – of a play Havel says was the hardest to write, with the result that it may be his weakest; but Sam Waters’s spirited and perfectly cast production still makes of it a rousing political satire.

The former dictator is lying low. The makeshift authority resides with the head of the armed forces, the chief of police, the state prosecutor, the head of censorship and a rich widow who is an intimate, or at least confidante, of them all. Mindful of the dangers of “latent authoritarianism” this group forms a secret, revolutionary council.

Mayhem ensues to the ...

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