The Memorandum | Living in Lies: Vaclev Havel’s Drama
In the following excerpt, Carey places Havel’s drama in three major phases: ‘‘The early absurdist comedies; the Vanek morality plays; and the psychological prison plays.’’
If the language games of The Garden Party relativize the human out of the equation, the use of a synthetic language—Ptydepe—enables Havel in The Memorandum (1965), winner of the Obie Award (1967– 68) for best foreign play, to focus on the process by which humans abdicate their humanity to linguistic and/or political systems.
Josef Gross, the Managing Director of an anonymous bureaucracy, receives a memorandum in Ptydepe, an artificial language designed to make human communication scientifically precise by making words as dissimilar as possible....
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