Václav Havel’s final theater piece, a shaggy-dog tale set at a pig roast and filled with music. Vladimír Morávek took an old dialogue of Havel’s, combined it with Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, and the resulting collage comments both on Communist Czechoslovakia and the post-Communist Czech era. Also included is Havel’s first ever one-act, Ela, Hela, and the Hitch. These plays, translated by Edward Einhorn, have never before been published in English translation.
Read the translator's notes from The Pig and from Ela, Hela, and the Hitch.
Reviews from the production The Pig in Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory at the 3LD Art + Technology Center:
"A combination of media satire, rural operetta, and political parable, ‘The Pig’ may be one of the more unexpectedly playful and rewarding offerings of New York's summer season."
- Backstage
"A provocative and frankly entertaining theatrical experience with thoughtful interplay between text and music, amusing anecdote and political commentary...a cause for celebration in its ambiguity, intelligence, and humor."
- Slavic and Eastern European Performance Journal
"Einhorn fundamentally gets Havel’s theatre, beyond the typically reductive readings of his plays as just ‘dissident’ theatre (a label Havel rejected), to an understanding that these plays are about language – how we use language and how language uses us. The prolixity, ellipses, and repetitions have a rhythm and aesthetic point, that here in Hunt for a Pig is beautifully offset by the musical refrains.”
- New York Irish Arts
“The true genius of the piece struck me as this: on the one hand, the ditzy reporter avoids questions about real politics with an important political and cultural figure in favor of this silly anecdote…but the anecdote ends up being devastatingly eloquent about the political and economic situation in the country at the time.”
- Travalanche
106 pages
$14.95
ISBN 0-9770197-9-9