Brothers Peter and Pavol Mikulík graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in the early 1960s. While Peter successfully completed his studies in directing in 1963 and immediately joined the SND Drama Theatre, where he shortly became a leading personality of the rising generation, Pavol received his diploma in acting two years later. He also worked briefly at the SND Drama Theatre, but in 1968, he became one of the founding personalities of the generationally and opinionally related studio called Divadlo na korze (Theatre on the Promenade), which became an oasis of artistic freedom in an otherwise not-free country. After the theatre was forcibly closed down at the beginning of the 1970s, he and some of his colleagues moved to the New Stage Drama Theatre. Thanks to his effortless expression, intellectual insight and ability to draw subtle psychological pictures, he was already facing difficult dramatic challenges shortly after his arrival, such as Tuzenbach in Chekhov's Three Sisters (1972) or Buenco in Goethe's Clavius (1976), and later Wurm in Schiller's Intrigue and Love (1981) or the title role of Chekhov's Ivanov (1981). His engagement in the SND Drama Theatre was, therefore, a logical outcome of his rising career as an actor. Mikulík joined the first stage in 1983, at a time when he had finally matured into a versatile character actor. He became the representative of men of great destinies at the SND; at first sight, they seemed to be inconspicuous creatures who hid passionate emotional tension under the mask of mundanity and dignity. Such were his characters Matej Bel in Solovič's The Bell Without a Tower (1984), Creon in Euripides' Medea (1985), and the Duke of Buckingham in Shakespeare's Richard III. (1987), Charley in Miller's Death of a Salesman (1991) or Casti-Piani in Wedekind's Lulu (1993).

 

We will commemorate Pavel Mikulík's artistry with a former audience hit from the SND's Small Stage, the 1989 production of the conversational and spicy comedy by Peter Karvaš, The Back Entrance or Pleasures on Tuesdays After Midnight, directed by Pavel Haspra. In addition to Mikulík, it also features other legends of Slovak acting - Soňa Valentová, Karol Machata, Zdena Studenková, Dušan Jamrich, Jozef Vajda and Monika Radvániová.

 

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