The Mladinsko Theatre's development progressed with contemporary theatre practices of the reformers of the Slovenian theatre during the second half of the 20th century, including directors Žarko Petan, Mile Korun, Dušan Jovanović, Ljubiša Ristić, Meta Hočevar, Paolo Magelli, Janez Pipan, Vito Taufer, Tomaž Pandur, Eduard Miler, Matjaž Pograjc, Martin Kušej, Dragan Živadinov, Emil Hrvatin, Tomi Janežič, Matjaž Berger, Jan Decorte, Diego de Brea, Jernej Lorenci, Ivica Buljan, Silvan Omerzu, Oliver Frljić, Borut Šeparović and Damjan Kozole.

In the early 1970s, Slovenian playwright Dominik Smole became managing director of the theatre and ensured that the Mladinsko presented artistically demanding youth performances.

), Emil Hrvatin (Male Fantasies), Eduard Miler (Susn, The Mission), Tomi Janežič (Oedipus Rex, Utva), Matjaž Berger (Galileo Galilei, Interpretacija sanj), Diego de Brea (The Damned, Crime and Punishment), Ivica Buljan (Young Flesh), Jernej Lorenci (Gilgamesh), Vinko Möderndorfer (Blasted), Barbara Novakovič, Vlado Repnik, Ivan Peternelj, Jan Decorte, Sebastijan Horvat, Damjan Kozole, Silvan Omerzu, and many others, have, together with Taufer's research of an extremely wide territory of theatre function (such as the performances Silence Silence Silence, Pippi, and Midsummer Night's Dream) and the projects of Dragan Živadinov resulted in the aesthetically most diverse period in the history of the theatre that the critical machinery in Slovenia – due to the limited tools with which it was operating, and ideological altercations of the political left, connected to the so-called independent or "dependent" production – didn't know to contextualize or couldn't analyse.

The tactics of epicization, formalist and energy theatre, the stage of the landscape, of parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, musicalization, visual dramaturgy, intrusions of the real, the scenic essay, heterogeneity, metonymic space, framing, scenic montage, aesthetics of speed, aesthetics vs. the real body, intermediality – to use the terminology used by Hans-Thies Lehmann for the analysis of the postdramatic – all this has taken the Mladinsko Theatre into the heterogeneous spheres of contemporary performing arts at the meeting points of various artistic mediums that have constantly enriched and added to the theatrical field.

Today, when audience members are ensconced in the post post-socialist era of the so-called transition period in Slovenia, the historic distance enables them to claim that without this support from abroad, Mladinsko as an example of contemporary theatre wouldn't have survived.