From the end of the 1960s the puppet theatre in Banská Bystrica entered a period shaped by the personality of the dramatist and director Jozef Mokoš.
Opera and operetta were still being performed in the 1930s and 1940s by a single company at the Slovak National Theatre. Only at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s were separate operetta theatres established in Bratislava (1946) and Presov (1948). Operetta as a genre was by then considered decadent and, although works by the likes of Strauss, Lehár, Nedbal and Dusík continued to be performed, the 1950s also saw the import of new musical comedy from the Soviet Union (including Dunayevsky). A sea-change occurred, however, in the following decade and musicals of mostly American and Italian origin (My Fair Lady; Hello, Dolly!; Fiddler on the Roof; West Side Story) began to be performed, joined in the 1970s by Slovak items such as Cyrano from the Suburbs – Cyrano z predmestia.
Following a stagnation in the spheres of both singing and production in the 1950s, the 1960s saw a deliberate concentration of new opera singers and a gradual assault on the standard international repertory thanks to directors such as Miloš Wasserbauer, Miroslav Fischer and Branislav Kriška. Throughout the second half of the century major new works by leading Slovak composers – including Eugen Suchoň, Ján Cikker, Alexander Moyzes, Ladislav Holoubek, Bartolomej Urbanec, Tibor Andrašovan and Juraj Beneš – provided an essential repertory of domestic opera.

V.
This outstanding period of Slovak theatre in all its genres was forcibly curtailed in 1968. The decade’s attempts at democratic reform of the whole political system in Czechoslovakia, led by the Slovak politician Alexander Dubček, had come to a head, and after a few months the interlude of „socialism with a human face“ was brutally terminated by the invasion of the country by Warsaw Pact forces. There followed a period which the new rulers referred to as „normalisation“. For the theatre this meant the abolition of a number of companies, including Bratislava’s Tatra Revue cabaret and Theatre on the Corso, the victimisation of artists and an attempt to turn back the clock to the 1950s. Nevertheless, the 1970s and 1980s were not, in fact, decades of stagnation for the theatre, for artists spontaneously rejected the ideological impositions and refused to identify with the principles of a re-installed socialist realism. In order to elude ideological control and possible censorship they began – in keeping with the trend in theatre internationally – to relegate the literary component in theatre and emphasise elements uniquely characteristic of the art form itself: acting, direction and visual and musical presentation.