The director, Pavol Haspra (1929 - 2004), worked at the SND Drama Theatre for forty-two years and was one of the profile creators in all the decades. His directorial style placed the theatre at the top of the qualitative ranks within the entire Czechoslovak context.

 

Haspra's dramaturgical interest was focused on dramas of incisive contrasts, strong conflicts and consequential drama, through which he pointed out the unchanging deviations of human action across decades and even centuries. He was not tempted by the impressionism of Chekhov's plays, the philosophical dichotomies in Jean-Paul Sartre's dialogues, the conversational refinement of Oscar Wilde, or the absurdity of the existence of Ionesco's characters. He was interested in an individual in a situation of acute crisis, falling to the bottom of one's psychological strength when one is forced to deny even the last remains of common sense in oneself. His productions were characterised by an expressive atmosphere, rapidly escalating tension and passionate rebellion. Hence, his greatest successes were his now iconic productions of Arthur Miller's plays After the Fall (1964) and The Prize (1969) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1965), John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1967), Pierre Corneille's Cid (1972), Alexander Vampil's The Partridge (1974) and The Duck Hunt (1986), William Shakespeare's King Lear (1975), Jordan Radicek's Attempt to Fly (1980) or a quartet of novels dramatisations by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1965), Crime and Punishment (1971), The Brothers Karamazov (1981) and Bessie (1990).

 

We will celebrate Pavel Haspra's directorial personality and distinctiveness with a title prepared by the current dramaturgy of the SND Drama Theatre at the end of the current season, a production of Maxim Gorky's play Vassa Zheleznova from 1967. The main characters are played by the legends of Slovak acting: Oľga Sýkorová, Eva Poláková, Viera Strnisková, Emília Vášáryová, Soňa Valentová, Eva Kristinová, Terézia Kronerová Hurbanová, Gustáv Valach, Štefan Kvietik and others.

 

The evening will be accompanied by theatre expert Karol Mišovic from the Institute of Theatre and Film Science of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.