The Beggar's Opera. This item is unavailable.The Beggar's Opera

The Czech President Vaclav Havel, a force on behalf of international human rights and his country's most celebrated dissident, first gained prominence as a playwright. During the period when Havel was blacklisted by the Czechoslovakian government for his political activism, productions of his work in and around Prague were regarded as subversive acts.

The Beggar's Opera is a free-wheeling, highly politicized adaptation of John Gay's well-known eighteenth-century work of the same name. The play, reminiscent of Havel's earlier Garden Party and The Memorandum, is up to his best satirical standard. Like the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera, Havel's play uses an underworld milieu to explore the intermingled themes of love, loyalty, and treachery.

Paul Wilson's new English translation of The Beggar's Opera is lively, idiomatic, and sensitive to underlying linguistic and political issues. The Cornell edition contains an Introduction by Peter Steiner that details the November 1, 1976, premiere of the play in the Prague suburb of Horní Pocernice, the reaction of the Czech secret police, and the measures the government took to punish and discredit those involved in the production. Eleven photographs―of the playwright, the actors, the theatre, and the actual performance―enhance the texture of the book.

Vaclav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and President of the Czech Republic in 1992. He is the author of many plays, essays, collections of letters, and memoirs, including Open Letters and Summer Meditations. Paul Wilson translated or cotranslated those books as well as Havel's Letters to Olga, Disturbing the Peace, and The Art of the Impossible. Peter Steiner is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context and Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, both from Cornell.