Havel play debuts without wife

When the communists were overthrown in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Vaclav Havel was impelled to abandon work on a play he had been working on, called Leaving, in order to govern his country (he was, of course, twice elected president). Tonight that play, which he completed and published last year, will receive its first performance at the Archa Theatre in Prague.

The play itself was at the centre of a larger drama last year involving Havel's wife, the actress Dagmar Havlova. After a very public row with Prague's National Theatre, who had refused to give her one of the lead roles, preferring to draw from their own roster of actors, Havel forbad them from performing the play. Since then, he has struck a deal with Archa who agreed to cast Havlova, 55, in the lead role. However, due to health reasons she has been forced to withdraw.

Although Leaving is about a politician whose life is thrown into turmoil when a new regime takes over and he is pushed out of his position, Havel, 71, insists the work is not wholly autobiographical, claiming that he began working on it back in the early 1980s. ·