It seemed the audience would not wait to see you this summer. What decided that you have begun the eleventh season according to the tradition of your holiday performances?

I myself don´t exactly know. Maybe I missed the old times when we tried to play with great enthusiasm also at times when it was not usual. And when I realized we were opening the eleventh season I thought it also had a certain value. However, it only may be a small sentimentality.

In the August programme there are two stagings plus their English versions. After last performances of three plays in the past season you still have eight titles in your repertoire.

That was so till the middle of June, when Ingrid Hrubaničová let us know she wouldn’t like to play any more. And so, unexpectedly, Impasse, Eo Ipso, Monodramas, Faces, and Hetstato disappeared from our repertoire. Moreover, as Zuzana Piussi is soon to bear her second child, we cannot perform the play The Bottom, either. We only can present From Afar, and Sami Meri Vari.

Does that mean the other stagings are lost for ever? Do you not prepare their farewell performances, at least?

I will miss the plays, although... if each of them appeared on the stage three times in the season, that would be enough (our small theatre might be filled for the most part).
Impasse - that was a real first night of the Stoka (Sewer) Theatre. It brought something uncalculated and uncalculable, unnamed and unnamable. We ourselves were surprised by the mysteriousness and the inner charge of ’nothing saying’ scenes which, naturally, tried very hard not to have a particular meaning, or a punch line, with the aim the fragments should stay fragments and deep scars for ever, and no outer or causal logic should be joined to them. In the basement room Black Raven’s, opened lately, the play Impasse had its Slovak first night, after the ‘world’ one, in the Netherlands. It was a toy of fate that the first auditor to see the play were permissive Dutch, witnesses of thousands cultural strata and efforts, a not tainted persons who chose an element of entertainment out of the play. Free persons.
The staging has attracted also us, in Slovakia, our spectators, and has had over a hundred night runs. We put it on the stage at several festivals, and in French Perigueux, at Mimos Festival, it has even won the main prize. Some spectators’ reactions were alike those of Dutch, some were surprised, many even uneasily intimidated by those strange people who do completely incomprehensible things in front of them. They worried it would turn out , and assault the audience (of course, that has never happened). Inspite of having been on the stage for nine years, there were always several people at occasional performances of the play present. However, we could never be sure whether the audience would have a good time or, on the contrary, whether they would be surprised, or bored. Well, we shall not play this staging, in which masks by Karásek dominated the art conception, and the audience will not see it again, either. What a pity. We could have recorded it on the videotape for the last time at least.
Eo Ipso - in a certain way, it was also an extraordinary opening night. After a long time, we returned to the spoken word and most actors were beginners of dramatic arts. Despite that, it attracted both the audience, and the theatrical experts’ attention (then there had not been the award Dosky - the Stage Boards - yet), and in theatre critics’ surveys it was often mentioned as the stage play of the season. Martin Porubjak even appreciated it as the Slovak stage play of the first free five-year plan.
Hetstato is a staging performed for less than a year, with a13-night run only. By chance, it was performed for the thirteenth time on the day of the ninth anniversary of establishing the Stoka Theatre - on 23rd of March, 2000. Being a serious candidate to take part in the Bonner Biennale Festival, in the play there performed four actors. Unfortunately, that play also died without its last night - without a respectable funeral.

Some time ago you said, everything essential in the theatre’s existence happened in the first year, when the core of the ensemble was established. You accepted departures - many a time connected with existential problems - with a poker face. Anyway, the ensemble reduced to minimum at the end of the season. Do you still insist upon your opinion?

I probably do. The rise of the ensemble was a coincidence of thousands chances, and such things usually do not come again. 

It’s a paradox that happened after significant awards at Divadelná Nitra 1998, and then after last year’s first night of the play Hetstato which was accepted by both the audience and critics very favourably. Is it a coincidence, or culmination of different artistic ways?

Maybe both. And surely also the logic of the development. After some time, it si natural some people leave. It is necessary to leave the events their natural course. Of course, a team composed of completely strange indivuduals, can be patched by force but, in my opinion, it is unnatural. Due to the fact, the state theatre ensembles are subsidized with money of taxpayers, many of them exist in this way. It is completely immoral, in fact.

You and Lucia Piussi then introduced your common play, From Afar, which you learned in English, too. It is soon to evaluate that step, but what was the reason to do so? What do you expect of it?

To tell you the truth, I have decided to emmigrate. I have not succeeded so far.

Do you plan to show any new people or former members?

Perhaps we will save the play Monodramas. Instead of Hrubaničová’s fragment we are preparing a new one with Erika Lásková, its working title is Portraits of Passengers. If we succeed, after the five-year break filled with the intensive office work, Erika will experience the first night’s feeling again. Unfortunately, without Jozef Chmelo’s fragment The Pamouks, because he also informed us he wouldn’t go on with us. Of course, that everything can be done after Zuza Piussi recovers from her second maternity.

For years, you have been the leader in the struggle of independent theatres for life. But your idea to abolish state theatres is also very well known. Some time ago, you published the tract entitled Where Does Our Misery Lie? in press which you seriously call it’s your life-time work. What about Stoka’s present financial situation?

The beginning of the year looked interesting and with good prospects. After the generous financial injection from the Ministry of Culture of Slovak Republic in 1999 (for all non-state theatres),  there arose hope of a better season. At the Ministry of Culture a more elaborated system of support was being worked out, they intensively spoke about a subsidy, although a small one, for the operational activity of independent theatres too, so we filled in very complicated data. At the same time, there emerged a chance to cooperate with a private television which intended to make four or five programmes monthly in our theatre. It looked promising. However, the Ministry probably changed its mind later, because the subsidies were minimalized, and the private TV got to troubles and still ows us some money.
So it is our entrepreneurial activity what saves us and, at the same time, it reveals our completely hopeless situation. Gradually, we alternated various “guest managements“ before we, desperate,  took over managing of the minicompany ourselves. We reached a good economic result only after we strained every muscle and nerve. At present, we pay all the obligatory and optional payments on time. Salaries on time, employment income taxes on time, and social securities levies, health insurance, employment exchange, unemployment insurance contribution both to the guarantee and social funds on time. We pay authors’ fees and their royalties to the Literary Fund on time, as well as contributions to the Authors’s Protection Union for the agreement to use musical works and their public performances, we deliver VAT on time, we have paid the rent for the pavement to the municipal part Staré Mesto, and the rent for the same pavement to the Municipal Authorities of the capital city, we pay for the collection and liquidation of rubbish on time, a rent for two square metres of the rubbish bin, we pay water rate and sewerage on time, as well as charge for draining off rain water, we pay consumption of electric power on time, heating, TV, radio, telephone bills, economic services... 
The only payment - charge of a hundred thousand Slovak crowns for spirit drinks and cigarettes to the municipal part for the year 1998 is delayed, but we shall pay it by the end of this year. A sum for the similar commitment for this year increases day by day, but it will be payable next year, in March. We also owe to a physical person ninety thousand. We shall pay out all the debts. The situation enables us to survive tomorrow, maybe also the day after tomorrow without essential debts. Yet, what will be in a year’s time, that is not within our power. If there’s something wrong with the roof, heating or water - we are absolutely not able to do anything with something like that. Or to think of having air conditioning done, what’s necessity for any public activities today, it stays only a dream for us. 
The result is, a couple of desperates who wanted to do independent theatre, must pay the state and city treasuries about one million two thousand crowns, as the law says, and then to beg humbly for creation of new stagings from the same authorities. (From the state fund Pro Slovakia, and from the Ministry of Culture we have been given six hundred thousand crowns.)
In that way, we have complied with the European dream.

After this record, do you not have the feeling you pay, despite indisputable artistic successes, an excessive tax for your long-wished-for independence?

Absolutely. It is also the source of my total disgust which takes my joy of life and of creation. The horrid awareness of the eternal subject who must turn his or her freedom and future over to somebody else is completely unmotivating. Of course, it is not only our problem. It is the situation of the whole society in which the individual’s freedom is driven back to the most remote corner. It is quite obvious it is the society that can ensure the country’s prosperity and a respectable status of her citizens. Under these conditions, it can never happen in our country.

Well, what about the next season?

We shall probably play fewer performances again. I am preparing a monodrama and, with more actors, we plan to prepare a staging with the working title Again.