SOURCE: A review of The Memorandum, in Plays & Players, Vol. 24, No. 8, April 1995, pp. 32-3.

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...