Private View/Protest
****
Mountain Hotel/Audience
***
Orange Tree, Richmond

It’s unfortunate that the Orange Tree’s enterprising season of work by Czech playwright-turned-dissident-turned-president Václav Havel started limply with the premiere of his most recent drama. Happily, the theatre is on far safer ground with four older pieces from the time when Havel’s plays were banned by a paranoid communist government.

In the 1970s, Havel created the semi-autobiographical figure of Vanek, a beleaguered Czech artistic Everyman, and wrote a series of short plays featuring him. In Protest, the punchiest of the trio here, Sam Walters’s fluid direction neatly suggests that what is most important is being left unsaid, slipping about in the interstices of the dialogue.

Vanek (Christopher Naylor), recently released from prison, and Stanek (Jonathan Guy Lewis), a writer in favour with the regime, discuss the perils of signing a petition. Havel, himself imprisoned for his part in human rights group Charter 77, crisply explains how one signature could ruin everything for a man’s entire family. A tangential treat is the 1970s casual wear in every conceivable shade of brown.

In Audience, Vanek (David Antrobus) works in a brewery, where the Foreman suggests that a better job could be his. Yet behind the beery geniality of this “little chat” lie the sinister forces of a surveillance state. Antrobus’s wonderfully non‑committal demeanour conveys a man forced to retreat deep into himself to find any safe haven.

Private View, in which a would-be sophisticated couple reach almost Abigail’s Party-esque heights of naffness as they discuss their recently refurbished “apartment with a persona”, provides some welcome laughs. Carolyn Backhouse and Stuart Fox have fun with the self-absorption of Vera and Michael, who criticise the unfashionable, unseen wife of their friend and ours, Vanek (Mike Sengelow). Havel leaves us to our own conclusions, which run along the lines that those in Seventies Czechoslovakia who fretted over the soft furnishings were somehow missing the point.

Mountain Hotel, a long and dreary absurdist piece, sees a number of guests atrophying Godot-style in a hotel garden. There’s a humorous whirl of climactic chaos as characters swop characteristics, a nifty comment on a society in which people assumed the identities that were required of them but it comes too late.

In rep until 6 December (020 8940 3633, www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk).