The Life of Vaclav Havel

In today's Telegraph the radio critic Gillian Reynolds wrote about The Life of Vaclav Havel which was broadcast on Sunday evening following the news of the death of the Czech playwright and politician earlier that day:

"Born into a professional Czech family, persecuted because of it, the experience developed in him (Havel) a sense of the absurdity of the world, a love of logically constructed arguments to support nonsense, exactly the qualities that made his plays so potent. I remember hearing his The Memorandum on Radio 3, way back in the days when the whole Communist bloc seemed frozen and far away.

Its translation into English was a BBC commission and a far-sighted one, the blackest of bureaucracies rendered farcical for a worldwide audience. It made Czech life instantly familiar, grim but graspable, scary but absurd. ...BBC radio continued to broadcast Havel's plays, from when they had to be smuggled out right up to the one that was about a man who unexpectedly becomes his country's president, as Havel did. The plays will live long after their political history has become footnotes."

Paul Murphy is the editor of the Radio 4 blog.

• You can hear The Life of Vaclav Havel on the Radio 4 website for the next five days or download the programme to keep from the Profile podcast.
• This week's Radio 3 Arts and Ideas podcast is a special edition devoted to archive material, reviews and interviews about Vaclav Havel and the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens who died last week.
• There are plans to broadcast a selection of the plays of Vaclav Havel on BBC Radio in the New Year.