SOURCE: A review of The Memorandum, in The Guardian, 30 March 1995.

In this review, Billington admires the irony in The Memorandum as well as the play's "brutally logical satire on the use of language to enforce conformity."

Vaclav Havel's most durable play, The Memorandum, from 1965, gets a welcome revival at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, which for two decades has treated him almost as a house author. And even if the work now seems a trifle over extended, it reminds one, in its brutally logical satire on the use of language to enforce conformity, of what Havel once called his "spiritual kinship" with Kafka.

Havel shows Josef Gross, the managing director of a large firm, suddenly discovering a surreptitious plan to replace the native vernacular with Ptydepe: a synthetic language designed to iron out all ambiguities and evasions. But although office business is meant to be conducted in this...