A far-right Slovak politician disrupted a performance of Irish playwright Elaine Murphy's play, 'Little Gem', at a village in northern Slovakia last Sunday.
Video footage of the incident shows Štefan Kuffa, who is Slovakia’s secretary of state for the environment, interrupting an outdoor performance of the play in the village of Malá Franková and demanding that parents leave with their children.
"I'm waiting for all the children to leave," Mr Kuffa tells an audience of a few dozen people, most of whom were adults.
Mr Kuffa is a member of the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, which is the smallest party in Slovakia's three-party populist coalition government.
'Little Gem' was originally performed at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2008 and went on to receive widespread critical acclaim. The play has been translated into numerous other languages and performed internationally.
Ms Murphy's humorous play tells the story of three generations of Dublin women from the same family who recount stories of love and loneliness.
The Slovak-language version of Ms Murphy’s play is performed by the country's Košice National Theatre under the title of 'My Baby’.
The theater describes the production as suitable for audiences aged 18 and over. In the video of the incident, a small number of children can be seen in the audience or nearby.
The incident was first reported by Lukáš Marhefka, the editor of Zamagurské Noviny, an independent Slovak news outlet, who had been attending the performance.
"Mr Kuffa, after seeing only a few minutes of the performance, interrupted the performance and appealed to the audience for all the children to leave," Mr Marhefka told RTÉ News.
"He said that he would keep standing there until all the children left the performance to make sure they would 'not watch those perverts'," said Mr Marhefka.
"Some people from the audience, including myself, objected and asked him to stop interrupting the performance and to leave."
Mr Kuffa later released a video in which he said: "We had a beautiful evening, there was a cultural event and a holy mass. At the end of the evening, they played a perverted film where there were children on stage."
The disruption ended after the mayor of the village escorted Mr Kuffa away and the performance of the play was later completed at the request of the audience.
In a statement issued to RTÉ News, Slovakia's Košice National Theatre said that the festival organisers had not indicated the suitability of the content for different ages and had apologised to the theatre.
"However, the situation did not justify anyone to intervene in the performance and start expelling spectators from the cultural event," reads the statement.
"If the State Secretary of the Ministry of the Environment of the Slovak Republic, Štefan Kuffa, had doubts about the suitability of the performance for minors, he should have informed the organisers."
The statement also reads that it is up to parents "to decide whether a given performance is suitable for their children" and that Mr Kuffa "began to arbitrarily deal with the situation".
Slovakia's deputy prime minister Tomáš Taraba has supported Mr Kuffa's actions, writing on Facebook yesterday that "progressive actors" had "played a perverse show full of LGBT+ scenes and inappropriate vocabulary".
The incident comes amid efforts by Slovakia's populist coalition government to assert greater control over public media and establish a nationalist, conservative agenda in the arts.
In July, the country's Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last May, said that Slovakia and Europe needed "to build a huge dam against nonsensical, progressive and liberal ideologies", which, he said, were "spreading like cancer".
Earlier this month, Slovakia's culture minister Martina Šimkovičová sacked the directors of the Slovak National Theatre and Slovak National Gallery, citing that they had taken part in "political activism".
Thousands of Slovaks protested in the capital Bratislava last week against the dismissals and called on Ms Šimkovičová to resign.
