ABSTRACT
The paper focuses on the Comedy of Errors staged in the Slovak National Theatre Bratislava, 1971, just twenty months after the Soviet military invasion of Czechoslovakia (August 1968). The production was praised as a cheerful and delightful entertainment. However, reading the photographic evidence today, one can argue for many poignant allusions which were not voiced by the contemporary critics. The visual elements on the stage and in the theatre bill referred to Russian tzarist and communist practices to show a chaotic cultural mishmash, gross decay, and deceptive identities, where nothing was to be taken at face value: no doubt, a picture of a disoriented and corrupt society „normalized“ by the Soviet hegemony. In a carnivalesque subvertion and desacralization, the production offered a picture of an irreverent barbaric world without faith or sublimity. The visual design further reflected the widespread idea that chaos and barbarism were to be expected from the communist Russian East (here imagined as the Orient).
