Oscar-winning Amadeus actor to perform newly discovered Havel play

Oscar-winning Amadeus actor F. Murray Abraham will perform in the world premiere of a newly discovered play by former Czech president and dissident playwright Václav Havel in New York later this month.

Abraham, 86, will appear alongside American writer Adam Gopnik in a staged reading of The Warning at Manhattan cultural center 92NY on Sept. 26. The previously unknown work was recently discovered among the papers of Czech writer and Charter 77 signatory Zdeněk Urbánek.

The casting gives the premiere another Czech connection: Abraham won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best actor for his performance as composer Antonio Salieri in Czech director Miloš Forman's Amadeus.

The Warning is a one-act work featuring two characters: Ferdinand Vaněk, Havel's semi-autobiographical alter ego, and a communist secret police officer named Šeřík, who arrives to warn him. Their encounter develops into a dialogue between the two men.

The unfinished text was discovered by David Dušek in the estate of his grandfather, Urbánek, a close friend of Havel.

Director Jiří Havelka has adapted the surviving material for performance, while Paul Wilson, a Canadian writer and former member of Czech underground band The Plastic People of the Universe, translated it into English.

According to Havelka, the work survived among a mixture of texts and material from Havel's diary and draws on the playwright's first imprisonment in 1977.

"You get a glimpse into the nascent concept of many future plays," Havelka said recently.

Rather than extensively adding new material, Havelka said the current version attempts to remain as faithful as possible to what survives, with his work involving selection and editing rather than rewriting Havel's unfinished text.

Havelka believes Havel may have abandoned The Warning because he ultimately explored the experience more fully in his 1985 play Temptation. Havel had also considered calling the unfinished work Šeřík.

An excerpt from The Warning was presented as a staged reading at France's Avignon theater festival this summer, but the Sept. 26 performance in New York will mark the work's world premiere in its reconstructed form.

The Czech premiere will follow Oct. 23 at the Prague Castle Riding Hall as part of the Havel Alive festival.

Leading Czech actors Ivan Trojan and Martin Myšička will perform the roles in Havelka's Czech production, which will also take the form of a staged reading.

The rediscovered work is intended to join Audience, Protest and Unveiling as part of a four-play cycle centered on Ferdinand Vaněk, the recurring Havel character whose experiences echo those of the playwright himself under communist rule.

The timing of the discovery also carries symbolic significance. Dušek has described finding the lost text as a gift from Havel ahead of what would have been the playwright and former president's 90th birthday on Oct. 5.

Abraham's participation brings one of the most recognizable actors associated with Czech cinema to the premiere. His performance as Salieri in Forman's Amadeus, much of which was filmed in Prague and elsewhere in then-Czechoslovakia, remains the defining role of his career.