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THE ROLE OF THEATRE AND DRAMA
situations in the interwar period is represented especially by Július Baré-Ivan
(1909-1953), originally a Protestant minister from a mixed Hungarian and
German-Slovak family background. His dramatic work was a metaphor for
the historical, philosophical, ethical and spiritual agenda of the 1930s and
1940s, and it gradually shifted from amateur provincial stages to the Slovak
National Theatre. Kazimir Bezek (1908-1952), Peter Zvon (1913-1942,
real name Vladimir Sykora), both lawyers by profession, and several other
playwrights wrote lyrical drama between 1936 and 1949. This movement was
influenced by the Czech avant-garde, especially by Poetism and Surrealism.'*
The repertoire of the Slovak National Theatre in the interwar period can
be examined using three sets of criteria: one, the proportion between original
Slovak plays and translations from other national literatures (considering both
preferences and exclusions); two, the proportion between the classical dramatic
repertoire (preference of tradition) and contemporary plays (expressing a shift
towards Modernism and the avant-garde in culture); and three, the proportion
between traditional staging and directing and modern/experimental staging
(including those cases when a traditional piece was staged in a modern manner,
and, vice versa, an experimental drama was adjusted to Realism in staging). The
list of twenty-six staged plays in the 1920-21 season contains one Slovak play
(by a Realist playwright Jozef Gregor Tajovsky, 1874-1940), about ten plays by
Czech playwrights (both older and contemporary), and among other pieces are,
for example, two plays by Ibsen, one by Shakespeare and one by Przybyszewski!”.
Thirty-two plays were premiered in the next season, out of which three were
Slovak and nine Czech, whereas other national literatures were represented
by dramatic works or literary adaptations by such writers as Wilde, Ibsen,
Bahr, Rolland, Maugham and Dumas. The 1932-33 season contained thirty
plays, four of them Slovak and four Czech, and other national literatures were
represented, for example, by Ostrovsky, Hasenclever, Gorky, and Afinogenov,
as well as Shakespeare, Goldoni, and others. The 1939-40 season, during the
rise of the nationalist Slovak Republic, brought seventeen new premieres, four
of them by Slovak playwrights, while Czech literature was only represented by
the nineteeth-century writer Karel Jaromir Erben. That year’s classic repertoire
included Sophocles, Moliere, Hugo, Ibsen, Hauptmann and Shaw. In the 1944—
45 season only eight plays were premiered; out of these two were Slovak, and
Calderon, Shakespeare and Moliere represented the classical repertoire.
Bezek studied in Prague and Zvon was Czech - his family moved to Slovakia after 1918.
Their theatre plays show their experience of theatre avant-garde in Prague (especially from
the theatre D34 and from the Osvobozené divadlo — Liberated Theatre).
The entire list of the repertoire in the dramatic theatre between 1920 and 1959 was published
in Pamätnica Slovenského nérodného divadla. Bratislava, SVKL, 1960, 297-349. The book
also contains a similar list for opera, operetta and ballet.
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