The artificial concept of a single Czechoslovak nation – in which, however, its more plentiful, and therefore stronger, Czech element held sway – amounted to nothing more than a somewhat more subtle and artful version of the extirpation of the Slovak nation.
It was in the spirit of this non-existent Czechoslovak unity that the traditional infrastructure of Slovak amateur theatre was disregarded. The location chosen for the incipient Slovak National Theatre, the nation’s first such institution, was Bratislava. Almost anywhere else, notably Turčiansky Sv. Martin or Liptovský Sv. Mikuláš, would have had a better claim to being the centre of Slovak cultural life. This city on the state’s southern border had at the time only a minority Slovak population, the majority of the inhabitants comprising Magyars, Germans and the adventitious Czech administrators, police and soldiers. There were virtually no amateur actors to speak of. It was a situation to which the Czechoslovak administration found its own response by inviting to Bratislava a provincial, second-rate Czech company from Pardubice, and this it was that became the basis of the emergent Slovak National Theatre. Auditions brought to the company no more than five (!) Slovaks, the nation’s first professional actors: Andrej Bagar, Janko Borodáč, Oľga Orszaghová, Jozef Kello and Gašpar Arbét.
Thus, from the outset, the Slovak National Theatre, located in the capital of Slovakia, played in Czech for Czech patrons. Moreover, Magyar and German audiences were more than generously catered for by the authorities: the city’s Municipal Theatre, the venue of the Slovak National Theatre, was always made available a few nights in the week for visiting Magyar and Austrian companies from Budapest and Vienna. There were also occasional visits by Czech theatres from Prague and other towns.
The twenties and thirties were marked by a lengthy fight to make the Slovak National Theatre Slovak; in other words, to make of it a place in which Slovak theatre culture could evolve. The state of affairs born of a misguided conception meant that particularly the first decade after the war was one of chaos, frequent changes of manager (one of whom, Oskar Nedbal, even committed suicide), muddled objectives, principled departures and, ultimately, the arrival of Slovak actors and directors. Starting at the end of the 1920s it proved possible first of all to stabilise the opera and ballet companies, perhaps because their genres are not so immediately involved with the sensitive issue of national language. But both were also fortunate in being headed by exceptional and broad-minded individuals – Oskar and Karel Nedbal for opera and the Italian Achille Viscusi for ballet – who managed to invoke the trends current in Europe at the time. In the 1930s Bratislava opera became a notable fixture on the central European map.