Scripts and opera libretti were increasingly treated as mere guidelines; what was important was the theatrical interpretation. Primacy passed from the author to the director and his team.
This trend was promoted mostly by a new generation which made its appearance in the course of the 1970s. It included directors Ľubomír Vajdička, Jozef Bednárik, Blahoslav Uhlár, Juraj Nvota and Roman Polák, the opera director Marián Chudovský, and set-designers Jozef Ciller and Ján Zavarský. In puppet theatre the same tack was taken by the Banská Bystrica company under Jozef Mokoš and its Bratislava counterpart headed by director Pavol Uher. Opera had to wait until the end of the 1980s for these new trends to prevail, with Jozef Bednárik’s 1989 production of Faust achieving international success.
The 1970s in theatre also saw a return to the classics of both domestic and international drama, frequently invoked for their humanism. New works sometimes still adhered to traditional dramatic form (including those of Ján Solovič, Osvald Zahradník and Mikuláš Kočan), but there were also many texts written for a particular production or which resulted from collaboration of the whole company (the case of, for example, Karol Horák and Ondrej Šulaj) or from stage improvisation and clowning.
The pre-eminent position of Bratislava theatres became less marked and more and more creative impulses came from a number of companies outside the capital, including from amateur theatre. The younger generation asserted itself first at theatres in Martin, Trnava and Nitra, and then Prešov. For the Slovak National Theatre the 1970s were a period of stagnation occasioned by the departure of the older generation. A progressive trend was to be seen in this and the following decade at Bratislava’s Nová scéna theatre, to which many directors and actors from the abolished Theatre on the Corso had transferred, among them Miloš Pietor, Vladimír Strnisko, Martin Huba, Juraj Kukura, Magda Vášáryová and Marián Labuda. Opera, operetta and puppet companies all undertook a great number of foreign tours throughout the two decades. Singers Peter Dvorský and Sergej Kopčák achieved an international fame, while sopranos Edita Gruberová and Lucia Popp enjoyed long careers at the world’s major opera venues.

VI.
The last decade of the century sees Slovak theatre in a stage of maturity. In the course of a hundred years the situation has changed radically and no trace remains of the amateurism of the first third of the century.