Mountain Hotel & Audience

Well, it jolly well is. Havel is a wonderful writer and we should be so
lucky to sit here enjoying his plays without having had to suffer, as
he did, under Communist censorship and vigilantism, let alone spend
four and a half years in prison. Admittedly Havel himself then had a
few perks as President of former Czechoslovakia. But he’s one of the
great heroic figures of our times, and these plays show how prescient,
cunning, witty and brave he was in periods of fear and
repression.

And they are deftly, spiritedly presented at the Orange Tree in lovely
productions by Sam Walters and Geoffrey Beevers. 
Mountain Hotel, a British premiere
translated by Jitka Martinova, is a Pirandellian farce set in a forest
resort, where tourists play word games with each other across five
scenes of accelerating surrealism, exchanging phrases and finally
characters. Two grey-suited authority figures pass enigmatically
through. The company fragments and re-forms in a strangely moving
“valse macabre”.

The guests include a blocked writer (Stuart Fox), a Russian count
(James Greene) who’s convinced a dashing, hollow-eyed diva (the
extraordinary Esther Ruth Elliott) was his lover in Paris, a
knitting, displaced aristocrat (Paula Stockbridge) who retires
upstairs with a different man in each scene, and a pair of
conspiratorial gigglers who say nothing.

These last two are played by Robert Austin and David Antrobus, who
appear in the bill’s opener, Audience,
as the foreman of a brewery and the stoically disgruntled writer Vanek,
reduced to rolling barrels in the cellar. This gem of a two-hander,
premiered at the Orange Tree thirty years ago,  uses repetition as an
accumulation of institutionalised threat, punctuated by the foreman’s
comical lurching offstage to the loo, bladder bloated with his own
bottled beer. The actors pitch this momentum, and the subterranean
rumble of big trouble, with absolute precision.

The foreman turns into an interrogating bully. “Are you in cahoots with
Kohout?” is a brilliant phrase in the translation by Carol Rocomara and
Tomas Rychetsky, a reference to Havel’s comradeship with Pavel Kohout,
a fellow dissident and founding member of Charter 77 in the bad old
days.

– Michael Coveney