Vaclav Havel has died

Vaclav Havel has died. I am not of that part of the world, have no Czech blood or connection yet this causes pause for thought and beyond that of the automatic sympathy felt for the passing of a good man of note. Playwright and human rights activist, instigator of THE ''Velvet Revoluton', eventual president of a European country known for its long-standing cultural capital, operating under various, oppressive, foreign influences. Czechoslovakia and the man were rare enough. From dissident to head of government during and after the collapse of the soviet union, Vaclav Havel remained a gentle-seeming, self-effacing man in the face of many slings and arrows. May he rest in peace. Which thoughts bring me to this Hamlet at The Young Vic and London on the southside of Waterloo Bridge. The first real play I ever saw was at the nascent Young Vic more than three decades ago - by Tom Stoppard, another Czech writer with his own take on Hamlet - and a vociferous London campaigner against Havel's mistreatment and imprisonment in the late 70's - Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead was on the English A Level syllabus even then. I remember butterfly anxiety and the slow burn of a special event amassing its pull - the industrial space, a modern play, the intent, mixed audience, actors' entrances and exits - the theatre was a life force, the play a revelation, heady stuff for an inner London youth in the throes of discovering the power and thrill of her city. Now so many years later here I am again. The pull of Hamlet, the pause for thought of a man. It is with regret that I have not yet seen a Vaclav Havel play. According to Sam Walters, director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, the only British theatre to have regularly produced his plays during a 40 year history, Havel plays are masterpieces, "funny, pertinent, wise and enormously theatrical". When I soon make my fourth visit to see Michael Sheen's thrilling, thought-provoking Hamlet at the Young Vic, I will suggest, now do Havel.