BALTIMORE „No. 1 for The Year on Stage" in 2007. That's what Baltimore-based weekly City Paper called the production of Václav Havel's play
The Increased Difficulty of Concentration written in 1968. The play was produced as a part of a festival season of Havel's plays in the US by the New York group True Comedy Theatre Company.
City Paper said Havel's 1968 play was the best piece of theatre to be seen in Baltimore during 2007. Baltimore is one of important theatre centres in the US, with plays produced by local or visiting highest quality ensembles with massive funding.
John Barry, writing about the year in Baltimore stage scene, said: "The play remains remarkably fresh. Two and a half hours fly by in this production, leaving you asking for more." He also sings praise of the new translation by Štěpán Šimek, a professor of drama and theatre at the Portland University and one of the authorized English translators of Havel's work.
Mr Havel was pleased when hearing the news about the Baltimore production: "If my plays generate some interest or success here or there, I am obviously always pleased," he told the Prague daily, Lidové noviny.
The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, the third play written by Václav Havel, is one of his least produced texts. It tells the story of a man who is unable to choose between his wife and his mistress, and describes a state of mind of somebody whose brain is losing ability to try to achieve something conceptually and even starts losing the orientation in time. It was first produced in 1968 at Theatre on the Balustrades (directed by Václav Hudeček) and in 1997 at the same theatre, this time directed by Andrej Krob and with Jiří Ornest in the lead role.