about the production
The Trnava form of Vlastimil Venclík's Private Performance staged under a title that somehow evokes spiritless little TV comedies, is certainly something more than a quick purpose-made TV titbit. Around a relatively simple anecdotic situation the producers have built up a colourful, compact and stratified stage structure which stands on the groundwork of very solid acting. The Trnava theatre heroically attempts – heroically because of its being face to face to a regional audience of an undetermined taste – to uphold the standard of specific, discernible poetics – definitely not majority poetics – of an expressive urbanity, an intelligent, but widely communicative humour which somehow “pillories” uniquely within the spectator's subconsciousness, but is often kneaded with the musical tingle-tangle playfulness. The heroes of the Trnava episodes, ludicrous, occasionally bizarre botchers with a good deal of melancholy and selfirony, act on the stage in a self-reflexive manner, they act a personage and simultaneously seem to watch it from above, they dynamically change the angIe of vision and obscure its “moral profile”.
Is father a silly, unimaginative shop-keeper, or simply a normal wornout man, allergic to fraudulent theatre by a hammy cultural shock group? ls the mother an oppressed, humiliated being with high ideals, or a hen terrorizing the family with petit-bourgeois manners? And finally: ls the whole “take-away” culture, as a principle, a more perverse degradation of the mission and function of art, or rather a distorted reflection of absolute academism, lifelessness of forms in its customary presentation? – I hardly need to stress that these are purely rhetorical questions. The answer always is "yes and no” and the questions themselves could carry an inexhaustible number of variants. But perhaps that is what things should be – in every good play and good theatre.
Martina Krénová
creators
directed by Juraj Nvota
translation and dramaturgy: Mirka Čibenková
music: Anton Popovič
set designer and costumes: Mona Hafsahl
cast: Ľudovít Moravčík, Anna Šišková, Peter Šimun, Marián Geišberg, Michal Rovňák, Dagmar Sanitrová, Roman Féder, Sáva Popovič, Vladimír Oktavec