According to Dávid Paška, holding up a costly mirror to society and criticising it with a smile is both a privilege and a duty. He does not approach theatre merely as fulfilling a programme.

"Your life belongs to me too" – this sentence appears on both the front and back cover of the programme for the production How to Become Someone Else, whose author is not only the contemporary French writer Édouard Louis, but just as significantly the twenty-seven-year-old Slovak director, playwright and writer Dávid Paška, who works on...

The end of the 2025/2026 season brought several significant premieres to Bratislava theatres, responding through various poetics to social tension, power, violence and the fragility of interpersonal relationships. The production The Merchant of Venice/Mauser, directed by Dávid Paška, combines Shakespeare's classic with Heiner Müller's text into a...

For the third time, works by the French writer Édouard Louis have found their way onto Czech, or more specifically Prague, stages. Following adaptations of the eponymous novels in Who Killed My Father, presented by Jakub Čermák with the company Depresivní děti touží po penězích, and Tomáš Loužný's History of Violence at Prague's Švandovo Theatre,...

Author: Štěpán Truhlařík // 10 June 2026

"Why the hell are you showering for so long?" screams an angry woman in her fifties wearing a grimy T-shirt at a handsome, gaunt twink. Drops of water sprinkle the stage, slowly soaking through his blond hair and the oversized orange T-shirt reading "NOT MOM'S FAVORITE". The father sips pastis in front of the television while the sister zips up...

Shortly after Donald Trump's second election as President of the United States, the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek published her work Endsieg. The postdramatic text takes the form of an uninterrupted stream of consciousness that associatively follows Trump's rise to power while simultaneously portraying the entire Republican MAGA movement through...

The texts of Elfriede Jelinek appear only rarely on Slovak stages. To date, the Nobel Prize–winning author has been staged in Slovakia only once – at the Slovak National Theatre in 2013, and without significant public response. For this very reason, the current staging of her text directed by Dávid Paška constitutes an event worthy of attention.

They live with their parents even though they already have jobs – because they have nowhere else to go. At home there is nothing and no one to offer them hope for a better life. And outside, there is none either. The world simply does not care what becomes of them. So they drift, seeking escape in casual sex and...

Author of the text: Soňa Jánošová // reporter for the daily newspaper SME

Dávid Paška directed three productions in the 2024/2025 season at four theatres:
the production Tatarka at the Slovenské národné divadlo,
The Bloody Sonnets at the Divadlo P. O. Hviezdoslava,
and Negatívy snehu: Wetzler, Vrba, Schulman, Lux at the Divadlo Jána Palárika in cooperation with the JK Opole Theatre (Poland).

Since their establishment in 1996, the DOSKY Theatre Awards have become the most renowned theatre prize in Slovakia. They remain the only theatre awards of their kind in the country to be broadcast on national television (RTVS).