[Below, Hughes-Hallett characterizes the mood of The Memorandum as one of "weary, witty disenchantment. "] Vaclav Havel's The Memorandum is set in the kind of office in which not only the people but even the notebooks are in danger of having their official existence denied if they lack the proper documents. The office routine is time-wasting and somewhat ludicrous but functions fairly smoothly until the deputy managing director, possibly, or possibly not, prompted by some unknown superior, introduces Ptydepe, a synthetic language designed to ensure the absolute precision of official memoranda by eliminating all the unnecessary and confusing emotional overtones of natural language. It's first rule is 'If similarity between any two words is to be minimised the words must be formed by the least probable combination of letters'. A Ptydepe department is set up to translate memos for staff who have not yet learnt the new language and evening classes instituted to make sure that they do learn it fast. Confusion follows.

The plot is circular, or rather caucus race-shaped, in that everyone ends up exactly where they started in the hierarchy of the firm, but the Ptydepe affair shakes things up enough to reveal both the funny and the sinister side of excessive bureaucracy. In Sam Walters' production the former is sensibly given prominence. The play takes the form of a Kafkaesque political allegory. One of the firm's regular employees is the staff-watcher, whose wretched job is to stand in an airless cupboard all day listening to conversations in adjoining offices; there are references to authorities 'higher up' who never appear and whose opinions, which can only be guessed at, are all-important. The two senior members of the Ptydepe department are given to behaviour strongly reminiscent of some of Pinter's thugs, putting their unshod feet up on the managing director's desk and talking across him, ignoring his nervous questions. But in this production the play's strength lies in its wit and the blend of realism and absurdity in its observation of office life: the pert secretary, Hana, played by Cindy O'Callaghan, who spends all day back-combing her hair, the rituals of coffee-making and lunch in the canteen, the frisson of embarrassment when the wrong person uses a Christian name and, most revealing of all, the tidy emptiness of the executives' desks. (When the managing director and his deputy change jobs for a spell all they have to move are their fire extinguishers.)

Our hero is Mr Gross, managing director, played with pleasant bafflement by Roger Swaine. When he objects to Ptydepe his deputy, using the kind of Alice in Wonderland logic that sounds unanswerable if you say it fast enough, persuades him to step down. Later he is as easily reinstated but the real action is taking place off-stage. The apparently bewildering shifts in the bosses' balance of power seem to reflect quite accurately the mood of the staff, as reported by Hana after her regular trips to the dairy-shop. The ambitious deputy is played fast and smoothly by John Challis but he's eclipsed by his wordless henchman Peregrine Pillar, who says nothing until the final scene but gets most of the laughs. Paddy Ward, who plays him, shrugs, grimaces and twitches with devastating precision.

John Baddely as a Ptydepe teacher is deliciously unctuous and Tony Aitken as the goody-goody of the class gives a marvellous performance, hinting in his few short scenes at a whole story of the unpopular man who tries too hard and whose world melts round him when even the teacher turns on him. But for me the real delight of the evening was Liz Crowther's performance in the tiny part of a sweet down-trodden secretary, the only character in this whole play about work who is ever actually seen to do any (and even her job consists mainly of doing her superiors' shopping). I have seldom seen anyone who looked so obviously, wholesomely good, and her reaction to Gross's cowardly refusal to help save her job—'No one ever talked to me so nicely before' is a moment radiant with selfless innocence in an evening whose predominant mood is one of weary, witty, disenchantment.