Vaněk, like Havel, was a dissident playwright, forced to work in a brewery because his writing has been banned by the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
A long, rambling, comic dialogue proceeds, in the course of which the brewmaster eventually becomes a sympathetic figure, rather than a villain.
However, the work became quite well known in the Czech Republic, in part because of a widely circulated radio production of Audience.
[2] Subsequent plays by other authors have also featured Vaněk, such as Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll, which addressed the importance of music in Czechoslovakia, and Edward Einhorn's The Velvet Oratorio, which imagined Vaněk during the Velvet Revolution.
Havel himself wrote a short modern sequel to Unveiling entitled Dozens of Cousins in 2010.