After a gap of nearly two decades, Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel made a comeback in local bookshops this week with a new work set to become the Czech literary event of the season. The play, entitled "Leaving" and inspired by Shakespeare`s "King Lear" and Anton Chekhov`s "The Cherry Orchard," has been showered with media praise even before it started ringing the tills -- and long before its stage debut set for next June. "It is necessary to say that this grotesque offering, full of spirit and irony about the levers of power, is a good play," commented the daily Dnes following the work`s media unveiling in early November. A well publicised wrangle over which theatre would stage the premiere helped focus attention on Havel`s first stage offering since 1988, with the prestigious National Theatre finally losing out to the Na Vinohradech theatre. Havel`s actress wife, Dagmar, will play the main female role with his longtime friend, Jan Triska, filling the male lead. Havel, who become known in the 1960`s for his works blending Theatre of the Absurd with the country`s homegrown Franz Kafka heritage, has drawn on his diverse political experience, from persecuted dissident against the communist regime to state president from 1989-2003. The play concerns "someone who filled a top position, is forced to leave it and sees his world collapse," Havel explained at its presentation in a Prague cafe. "For someone who was president of his country for 13 years until the end of his term, the title runs the risk of giving the impression that the inspiration came from his own departure," the slight, 71-year old added with a smile. Havel, however, said that he started to write the play in the 1980`s "...long before the revolution (of 1989) and long before the presidency." "At the time, I had completed around two-thirds of the manuscript before abandoning it. Then, towards the end of the presidency, I started in my spirit little by little to return to this subject," Havel. He finished the work during a stay of several months in the United States, where he also completed his autobiography, entitled "To the Castle and Back" and already translated into several languages. More than a mirror of his own experience, Havel said "Leaving" evokes the path taken by certain reformist communists who joined the dissident movement after being chased out of their leadership posts following the 1968 Soviet invasion of former Czechoslovakia. Certain reviews, such as that in Dnes, suggested that the central conflict between the main character, the outgoing chancellor Vilem Rieger, an indecisive intellectual, and his implacable successor Vlastik Klein, recalls the long rivalry between Havel himself and his right-wing former prime minister Vaclav Klaus, who succeeded him as head of state. "A play as a political testament? Fortunately, it is not so simple," contested the business daily, Hospodarske Noviny. Drawing similarities between Havel and Rieger demands as much speculation as asking whether "Vaclav Klaus is there or not", the paper said, adding: "it`s not a play written solely for the Czech public" and "in Iceland or the Philippines, no-one would lose themselves in such speculation." While Havel admitted that his "presidential term provided him, here and there, with a certain inspiration," he focussed more on the play`s links with the works of William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov. "Lear is a sovereign who loses and power and whose world crumbles. In my play as well, the heart of the hero disintegrates and there appears, like everywhere, archetypal traitors and sycophants," he said. And like Chekhov`s "The Cherry Orchard," the family leaves their house against their wishes. While waiting for the curtain to raise on his new creation, Havel said he has already started on a new work.