Jos Repertory Theatre: Audience

The Nigerian actors representing Vaněk and Sládek are performing in a play written in an entirely different time, in 1975, and an utterly different context, when the author, like his hero Vaněk, was forced to roll barrels in a brewery in Trutnov. However their convincing testimony and understanding of the absurd mechanisms of totalitarian power attest to not just the universality of Havel’s ideas but also to the extent to which freedom, truth and love resonate in Nigerian society.