Prague raised the curtain yesterday on a play exposing the anguish of a politician facing eviction from power, written by a former president with a score or two to settle.

Vaclav Havel's new play - the last was written in a different era, before the collapse of communism - drew loud praise from Czech theatre critics even before its premiere. “You can already describe the staging as a success,” Petr Fischer, the influential critic of Hospodarske Noviny, said. “An agreeable surprise,” chipped in the daily Pravo.

But for ordinary theatregoers the play is being studied like a coded message. Just as British readers have combed political memoirs for insights into the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, so the Prague audience is hungry for hidden nuggets on one of the most enduring feuds in post-communist Europe.

“What does it tell us about the ins and outs of the relationship between Havel and Vaclav Klaus - that's what I want to know,” Jiri Langer, a student, said before the first night.

Mr Klaus succeeded Mr Havel as President of the Czech Republic and the tension between them has been crackling ever since. At the time of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that toppled the communists, Mr Havel, 71, was a chain-smoking dissident, a romantic intellectual who believed that the police state had been defeated because so many Czechs shared his vision of a wide-open, compassionate Europe.

Mr Klaus was an economist who emerged from the communist era as an avowed disciple of Margaret Thatcher. As President, he holds the euro in contempt, thinks the European constitution is not worth the paper it has been written on, and is deeply sceptical that humans are causing climate change.

As Prime Minister, Mr Klaus made Mr Havel's life a misery in his later years as President and eventually levered him out of the Hrad, Prague's hilltop presidential palace. Traces of the grudge are all too obvious in the play, called Leaving (Odchazeni). The hero is Vilem Rieger, a leader who has just lost power but is reluctant to admit it. He is refusing to leave his official villa because that would be surrender. His successor, Vlastik Klein - bearing not only the initials of Vaclav Klaus but also played in a way that recalls the President's manner - piles on the pressure to leave the villa.

“Some journalists or members of the audience may be looking for this in the play,” Mr Havel conceded. But he emphasised that it was first hatched in his mind in 1988, a year before the Velvet Revolution and before he knew Mr Klaus. He says it is a play that is supposed to explore the arrogance and vanity of power: “How is it possible that, for some people, power has such charisma that without it their world collapses?”

It shows how Mr Havel was seduced by power. When he first entered office in 1989 as president of what was then Czechoslovakia, he tried to retain a playful distance from power, rolling down the long corridors of the Hrad on a child's scooter, meeting rock stars in cafes and surrounding himself with ponytailed advisers who were also close friends.

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