about the production
(...) Although the play Tax-collector by Milan Uhde was written during the totalitarian regime (1966), the themes of power and manipulation which are dominant in the play are topical today as well (even more?). The monodrama revolves around unusual, suspicious hypersensitiveness and irritability towards other people, whom the tax-collector – Marcel Ochránek – defined for himself as enemies. The tax-collector invades his victims’ flats not to examine the actual states of affairs, but to catch them “red-handed”. (…) The story of Tax-collector set in an almost concrete flat thus assumed universality.
Mária Jenčíková, theatre critic
Director Svetozár Sprušanský put a universal principle into this politically ciphered – in order words, model play. Though it did not necessarily need to be only a personification of political power, but in general also the manipulation of one human by another. In this sense the producers succeeded in outlining almost a Kafkaesque problem.
(...) The intrusive tax-collector at first knocks on the door, and then enters without invitation. Victims – tenants embodying docile accustomed submissiveness and silence of people during totalitarianism. The guest, an unwelcome witness of their private lives, triumphs over them.
(...) The production excels at the already proven space of a scenery repository. Subtle work with soft lamp light helps to accentuate a thorough penetration into the consciousness of the blackmailed. The final scene is a kind of the triumph of the evil and evil powers, during which the theatre’s “technical pit” opens, symbolising the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Miroslav Ballay, research fellow in aesthetics
creators
directed by Svetozár Sprušanský,
translation: Jozef Fabuš,
dance: Petra Fornayová,
setting: Svetozár Sprušanský
characters and cast:
Tax-collector: Marcel Ochránek, Woman: Kamila Beťková, Man: Michal Kožuch, Voice: Ctibor Filčík
director
Svetozár Sprušanský (1971)
Belongs to the most versatile young theatre professionals in Slovakia. Along with the function of dramaturge in his mother playhouse Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra, he was also artistic director of the Theatre’s Drama Ensemble. He initiated a search for other possibilities of theatrical activities, thus being responsible for the birth of the “alternative” association ZDVIH, which continues the rich traditions of studio experiments in the Nitra professional theatre. There he also expressed himself more markedly as a director of interesting productions of Chekhov’s one-act plays The Bear and The Proposal, Terezka by Lenka Lagronová, Fire Face by Marius von Mayenburga, The Wedding by Bertolt Brecht, and last, Tax-collector by Milan Uhde.