Slovak Directors Avoid Intrusion
Matti Linnavuori*
Nová Drama Festival of Contemporary Drama in Bratislava, Slovakia, 12 to 17 May, 2025.
The 21st edition of Nová Drama (New Drama) showed a jury’s selection of ten best Slovakian premieres of the preceding year (2024). One of the productions was a very different realization from the rest, and I will return to it after discussing some others first.
It took me a while to understand that the seeming lack of directorial input was a deliberate artistic choice, and therefore not to be dismissed as inexperience or incompetence. The productions presented a proposal rather than a statement for us spectators to weigh according to our resources, be they moral, intellectual or political—this demonstrates the artists’ respect toward their audiences. The shows shun away from pushing their spectators to conclusions, but instead they offer us material for reflection. Perhaps I misinterpret the political situation in Slovakia, but it seemed that theatre had decided against participation in a free-for-all shouting competition; or perhaps theatre may consider it too risky? It was only after the final applause that actors read a statement in defense of independent arts—which do not enjoy much sympathy from the current government—and received another round of thunderous applause.
The non-intrusive directorial approach was applied across genres, in comedy as well as in high-brow meditative performances and sorrowful horror.
Miracle and Illness
The Life, Miracles, Ecstasies and Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, Sister Juana de la Cruz tells the story of a Spanish nun and later abbess Juana (1481-1534), who was a male embryo, but at the request of Virgin Mary God turned Juana into a female at birth, while leaving her Adam’s apple visible to make the miracle concrete. This, of course, suits perfectly to contemporary understandings of gender diversity. Even more impressive, the Batyskaf performing company’s piece was meticulously researched, with bibliographical notes shown at the bottom of English translation surtitles.
The sole performer, Anka Sedlačková, is a dancer and choreographer. She also spoke as Juana; in addition there were voice-over narrators. The creators are dramaturg Magdaléna Žiaková, set designer Juraj Mydla and director Ema Benčiková.
There were magic moments: Juana took a bite from an apple and the sound system looped her munching into a dance rhythm; Juana instructed us how to correctly bend our heads to prayer—medieval piety demanded plenty of time, which gave the show its subdued moment of dare-I-say comedy.
The main point was, I believe, that a woman was able to give sermons in the Middle Ages; hence there can be no justification for gender-based restrictions to anyone’s freedom of speech in our enlightened time. Easy enough to agree, but this is seldom delivered with such crystal solemnity.
Likewise, A Sad Report from a Sad Country came with a fair amount of research, this time genre-related. Written by Tereza Trusinová and directed by Jana Wernerová for Theatre on the Platform in the town of Košice, it borrowed from Beckett as well as from filmic horror, and commented on its godfathers both lovingly and critically. A son returns to his parental home, where his mother and sister (played by two actresses side by side) run a hotel. They fail to recognize him and proceed to kill him, just as they have treated all their customers. He is drowned in a river, but the production never needs to leave the dark musty room—he sinks into the bed. A pastiche, perhaps, but with irresistible charm.
Schwanengesang D957/Swan Song also dug deep, to real-life emotions its creator underwent witnessing cancer. Originally produced in the Slovak National Gallery, the performance opens with the opera singer, architect and theatrical creator Peter Mazalán singing Franz Schubert to the accompaniment of Peter Pažický’s piano. The concert is disturbed by two women leaving the room, and even more annoyingly, leaving the door open behind them. When they return, they take over the stage.
The younger woman, caregiver to her autistic son, recounts her experiences in breast cancer treatment. In Jana Bodnárová’s text, this is done in series of beautiful poetic images. I would like to turn away from them because of their calculating literary nature, but must not because of the real-life weight of the events depicted, and cannot because of the intensive yet fragile acting of Táňa Pauhofová.
Relationships Comedy
Happy End and Status Quo were comedies about gender relationships. Happy End was written and directed by Alžbeta Vrzgula for the Uhol_92 company, and Status Quo is a translation from playwright Maja Zade’s German original (2019).
Happy End appeared to evolve as an improvisation, as if the actors had the freedom to hesitate, pause and negotiate amongst themselves a safe passage in some unspecified direction. In other words, the director seemed to have withdrawn from decision-making. This matched the topic, which was the constant fumbling in a relationship, where one does not know if this actually is a relationship, and is afraid that any unintentional insult may ruin everything. The idea was more intriguing than its realization, a succession of non-committal, lazy mini-conflicts.
Status Quo turned gender roles upside down. A cute young man gets bossed around by tough ladies in the office, at home, at work, everywhere. He is also sexually harassed, spoken of with contempt and innuendo. Female spectators recognized the situations only too well and rewarded the performers with laughter. To me, a well-meaning but far too comfort-seeking male viewer, the Žilina City Theatre’s production revealed the extent of harassment the other half of humanity is compelled to face daily. Marián Amsler’s direction interspersed the sketches with hit songs, which highlighted rather than hid the situation comedy nature of the text.
Debates with the Party
Dominik Tatarka (1913-1989) was a Slovak writer and an outspoken critic of the communist regime. Dávid Paška’s direction Tatarka for the Slovak National Theatre merits special attention for its set design, by Julius-Leon Seiler, which uplifts the goings-on concretely and metaphorically: a giant brain plus a Soviet-style poster hang ominously above the stage.
The production draws from the writer’s autobiographical books to tell the story of life in struggle. The show opens in Paris in the year 1938, where young Tatarka (Daniel Žulčák) was what we now call an exchange student. While he was becoming romantically involved, Britain and France handed a major part of Czechoslovakia over to Nazi Germany at the Munich conference; political pressure was to be the main character’s destiny from early on.
Once back home, Tatarka—and the play—get stuck in endless debates with Mataj, the communist in charge of supervising the arts. Tomáš Maštalír is excellent as the menacingly good-natured Mataj, whose deadpan verbal twists illustrate Marxist-Leninist logic at its shall-we-say best.
Robert Roth plays the mature and the old Tatarka. He is a remarkable actor, but there are times when he volunteers to carry the entire production on the shoulders of his talent, and he may just present more of Roth than of Tatarka then.
In A Dog on the Road Robert Roth’s acting is more disciplined to my eye, possibly because this is the only real director’s work of the festival, and possibly because he shares the stage with three other actors of equal status and task. I already wrote enthusiastically about A Dog on the Road, but on second viewing I understood that Dušan David Pařízek’s adaptation and direction from Pavel Vilikovský’s 2010 novel contain more qualities than roaring comedy and satire of narrow nationalism.
In a split second the actors accelerate to full rage, debating the demerits of being Slovak, but the clever adaptation counterbalances this with a plot of equal weight, namely a fledgling love story between two disillusioned middle-aged persons. The four actors take turns in all the roles, which makes this a spectacle of ideas rather than a psychological character development. They wander freely into the minds of those present on the stage just like their idol, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard.
Witnessing and sharing a home audience’s reception added meaning to my experience: people applaud the sharpness of argument, the witticisms. There is a strong sense that this furious analysis is what Slovakia has been longing for, and, not unexpectedly, A Dog on the Road was awarded Nová Drama’s Grand Prix.
Earlier visit by Critical Stages to Nová Drama:
*Matti Linnavuori wrote theatre criticism between 1978 and 2013 for various newspapers and weeklies in his native Finland. In 1985, he worked for the BBC World Service in London. Since 1998, he has presented papers at numerous IATC events. In the 2000s, he wrote for Teatra Vestnesis in Latvia. Since 1992, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In 2016, his play Ta mig till er ledare (Take me to your Leader) ran at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki.
Copyright © 2025 Matti Linnavuori
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
