The Memorandum

This is a brilliant play, a farce about language, bureaucracies, and surveillance. It takes place at the surprisingly real and relevant intersection of Monty Python, The Office, and 1984. This 1967 translation happens to be appallingly tin-eared; but this should not bother the reader too much. (Any theater groups actually planning to stage the play will have to rewrite nearly every line for tone, although the content is, of course, fine.)

Seldom does a play this funny manage to be this intellectually fertile. Using a humorous and absurd story about protocols for memorandum-writing, Havel addresses weighty postmodern semantic issues such as over and under- signification, the surplus of meaning, and the floating/decentered signifier. I enjoyed the play partly for those facets, but it is highly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating even for those who aren't interested in the formal study of semantics and language. Despite all these weighty issues, the humor is brilliant, and this is one of the rare plays that made me laugh out loud, just from reading it, not even seeing it staged.For those not in the know, the author of this play spent much of his life as a political dissident and activist in Czechoslovakia, and was elected that country's president after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. It is interesting to think about how Havel's thoughts on bureaucracy and memorandums inform his life as a political leader and statesman.