Vaclav Havel's politics 'overshadowed' playwriting

Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic's first president after the Velvet Revolution against communist rule, has died at the age of 75.

In the late 1970s he had become Czechoslovakia's best-known dissident and helped found the Charter 77 movement for democratic change.

Sam Walters, director of the Orange Tree Theatre in London, first staged a play by Havel in 1977 and told BBC News that his political life overshadowed a "wonderful " career as a playwright.