SOURCE: A review of The Memorandum, in The Independent, 31 March 1995.

In the following, Taylor offers a favorable assessment of The Memorandum.

At the start of Vaclav Havel's The Memorandum, the managing director of a company is seen desultorily sorting through his in-tray, when all of a sudden he's arrested by the contents of a particular document. I use the verb advisedly, for from that moment the MD's life is turned upside-down with the abrupt arbitrariness and illogic that characterise Josef K's arrest at the beginning of The Trial. The memo that launches the absurdist lunacy in this 1965 play (now spiritedly revived by Sam Walters at the Orange Tree) is written in "Ptydepe". Sounding like gobbledegook, it is a synthetic language that's been designed to eradicate all ambiguity and imprecision from office discourse by making words as different as possible from each other in spelling. On lesser-used nouns, this...