Contemporary Slovak Drama 4 [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This fourth volume in the Contemporary Slovak Drama series published by the Theatre Institute provides us with an opportunity to assess briefly our work so far and to consider how we should continue. The great majority of the plays we have published were written in the past ten years - that was in fact our intention, to enable foreign readers, theatre experts in particular, to acquaint themselves with contemporary Slovak drama in the hope that these plays would be presented not only in Slovakia, but elsewhere as well. In the course of the past three years, up to ten Slovak plays have been performed or read on the stage in Great Britain, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic. A play by Rudolf Sloboda, Armagedon on the Grb, presented as a stage reading at Warsaw's Teatre Rozmaitosci, met with success and was published together with studies of the Slovak theatre in the Polish journal Dialog (no. 4/2002). The Theatre Institute contributed considerably to the preparation of this issue of the journal. For such a small country and culture, all of this is quite a favourable response. The question of how the Theatre Institute will continue to support Slovak drama is, however, still an open one. It depends partly on the parliamentary elections in September 2002, which may bring changes to the sphere of culture, but also on the overall strategy of support for the development of drama. So far as the promotion of Slovak drama abroad is concerned, there are a number of possibilities. One of them is simply to continue with the Contemporary Slovak Drama series in the future, but perhaps not every year and perhaps not as a book. Or a selection of plays could be published in other world languages, which I would favour after our positive expe- 9