Jozef Budský began his Bratislava career in the mid-1930s as a member of the Czech SND drama company. Gradually he developed into the protagonist of the company, to whom directors assigned the most serious roles of the repertoire – Galen in Čapek's The White Disease (1937), Don Carlos in Hugo's Hernani (1940), the title role in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (1941), Viktor Žiaranský in Stodola's Marína Havranová (1941) and Puk in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1942). Already at the end of World War II, the theatre management commissioned him to direct his first productions. He proved himself and gradually gained more and more trust of the company, the management and the audience. His productions were regarded as the standards of the artistic quality of Slovak theatre. Molière's Tartuffe (1946), Marína by Sládkovič (1948) and The Assassination by Lahol (1949) became emblematic stage pieces of the post-war era. The quality of Budský's work, despite political issues, was not undermined by the schematism of the 1950s, although he reached his directorial zenith in the second half of the decade. He was one of the first artists to react promptly to the so-called social mellowing and to bring back metaphor, allusion and symbolism, which had been forbidden by communist aestheticians before that. His staging of the poetry by Štúr's followers, The Song of Our Spring (1956), as well as the staging of Tyl's The Bloody Trial (1957), Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1957), Čapek's The White Disease (1958), Arbuzov's Irkutsk Story (1960), Chekhov's Ivanov (1961), Hochhuth's The Deputy (1966) and Tolstoy-Piscator's War and Peace (1974) are permanently inscribed in the modern history of Czechoslovak theatre.
We will commemorate the personality of Jozef Budský with a production of a genre he rarely reached for, but in this case, it was with a great success - Ladislav Stroupežnický's comedy Vítúzi (Our Furiants in the original Czech) from 1970. Gustáv Valach, Vladimír Durdík Sr., Jozef Kroner, Július Pántik, Eva Krížiková, Emília Vášáryová, Anna Javorková, Ivan Mistrík, Juraj Slezáček, František Dibarbora, František Dibarbora, Samuel Adamčík, Oľga Budská, Zuzana Cigánová and many other legends of Slovak theatre perform in Budský's direction, inspired by the poetics of the Expressionist grotesque.
The evening will be accompanied by theatre expert Karol Mišovic from the Institute of Theatre and Film Science of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.