It would have been the perfect anniversary party until an actor fell ill. Svandovo divadlo had scheduled its production of Václav Havel's very personal riff on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera to open Nov. 1, 30 years to the day after the piece's premiere. However, fate is often the final stage manager, so now the piece is opening eight days later.

Fate has certainly had a hand in directing the fortunes of Havel's life, no more so than with his Beggar's Opera, a wonderfully satiric play that Havel has said he wrote with joy and ease. Neither quality, however, was present during the play's first rehearsal process, as Havel's tale of the underworld was forced to go underground.

After 18 months of secret rehearsals in various flats and basements, Havel's friend and director Andrej Krob and a cast of amateur actors (who lived by day as engineers and teachers) presented Havel's The Beggar's Opera at a pub in Horní Pocernice outside of Prague to an audience of about 300 people, both locals and Prague artists and intellectuals. Opening night also proved to be the closing night, as the state police found out about the production and descended on the audience afterward. Many were interrogated, with some eventually losing their jobs and passports.

The resulting crackdown also had repercussions for the theater world, as the authorities placed tighter controls on Prague's artists, many of whom came to blame Havel for the constraints. Even with the added harassment and ostracism, Havel has said that the premiere at Horní Pocernice is the one that he "values more than any other I have ever had."

Twenty years later on Nov. 1, 1995, with communism safely packed away in its coffin, Krob and many of the original cast members hit the stage of Divadlo na zábradlí for an official Prague opening of The Beggar's Opera before the country's president, Václav Havel. It's not every play that gets two premieres, but Havel's witty and (a word seldom used in describing his work) raucous reworking of Gay is worth it.

The London rogues, whores and mountebanks of Gay's "Newgate pastoral" of 1728 are all here (Gay's politically inconvenient work also suffered from thin-skinned rulers, with his sequel, Polly, being outright banned from production by Sir Robert Walpole). It's the same cast of cads that populate Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil's more popularly known Weimar version, The Three-Penny Opera. There's the king of the underworld, Macheath (Mack the Knife), the conniving Peachum, the lowlife grands, and Macheath's love interests, Polly, Lucy Locket and Jenny.

"As with Gay and Brecht, Havel's play is about trust and betrayal," actor Michal Dlouhy´ says over tea at Svandovo's bar between rehearsals. "But there are differences in tone. Havel's language is more colloquial, but at the same time, he uses the play to explore how language is corrupted. It becomes a critique of language."

Stage and film star Dlouhy´ has the plum role of Macheath, though he confesses that the line load can be overwhelming. "I don't know how two months of rehearsal suddenly [came to feel like] five years," he laughs over the exhaustion he feels after working on the character. "There's a lot of subtext in Havel's play to discover."

According to Dlouhy´, this primarily political subtext is still as relevant today as it was in 1975. "It's contemporary," the actor says. "Audiences will be able to see aspects of the current Czech political scene very clearly." Even if the characters are ostensibly British, Dlouhy´ calls Macheath and company "typical Czechs."

Unfortunately, Havel's The Beggar's Opera has been given scant regard in the West, which Havel has blamed on the "cult of Brecht." But it's a piece well worth discovering. And happily, Svandovo is staging the play with English surtitles, based on Paul Wilson's recent translation.