Sports Play Read online

  Just a Must in partnership with the Austrian Cultural Forum

  London presents the English-language premiere of

  SPORTS

  PLAY

  by Elfriede Jelinek

  Translated by Penny Black

  with translation assistance and a foreword

  by Karen Jürs-Munby

  First performed at Live at LICA (Nuffield Theatre),

  Lancaster on 11 July 2012.

  11 July

  Live at LICA (Nuffield Theatre), Lancaster

  01524 594151 www.liveatlica.org

  13 July

  The Maltings Theatre & Cinema

  (Henry Travers Studio), Berwick-upon-Tweed

  01289 330 999 www.maltingsberwick.co.uk

  19-20 July

  Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff

  029 2031 1050 www.chapter.org

  23-24 July

  The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter

  01392 434 169 www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk

  30 July-4 August

  Chelsea Theatre, London

  020 7352 1967 www.chelseatheatre.org.uk

  SPORTS PLAY

  by Elfriede Jelinek

  Translated by Penny Black

  with translation assistance by Karen Jürs-Munby

  CAST

  Victim/Chorus Member Michael Cole

  Young Woman/Chorus Member Nina Hatchwell

  Elfi Elektra Denise Heinrich Lane

  Achilles/Sportsman/Chorus Leader Tom Lyall

  Hector/Man/Chorus Member Matt Ray-Brown

  Woman/Chorus Member Delia Remy

  Andi/Chorus Member Giorgio Spiegelfeld

  CREATIVE TEAM

  Director: Vanda Butkovic

  Producer: Berislav Juraic

  Dramaturg: Karen Jürs-Munby

  Scenographer and Video Designer: Simon Donger

  Costume Designer: Meni Kourmpeti

  Lighting Designer: Ana Vilar

  Stage Manager: Jessica Thanki

  Vocal Coach: Adrienne Smook

  Assistant Director: Jari Laakso

  Production: Just a Must in partnership

  with the Austrian Cultural Forum London

  ELFRIEDE JELINEK

  Elfriede Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in the town of Mürzzuschlag in the Austrian province of Styria. Her father, of Czech-Jewish origin, was a chemist and worked in strategically important industrial production during the Second World War, thereby escaping persecution. Her mother was from a prosperous Vienna family, and Elfriede grew up and went to school in that city. At an early age, she was instructed in piano, organ and recorder and went on to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory. After graduating from the Albertsgymnasium in 1964, she studied theatre and art history at the University of Vienna while continuing her music studies.

  Elfriede Jelinek began writing poetry while still young. She made her literary debut with the collection Lisas Schatten in 1967. Through contact with the student movement, her writing took a socially critical direction. In 1970 came her satirical novel wir sind lockvögel baby!. In common with her next novel, Michael. Ein Jugendbuch für die Infantilgesellschaft (1972), it had a character of linguistic rebellion, aimed at popular culture and its mendacious presentation of the good life.

  After a few years spent in Berlin and Rome in the early 1970s, Jelinek married Gottfried Hüngsberg, and divided her time between Vienna and Munich. She conquered the German literary public with her novels Die Liebhaberinnen (1975; Women as Lovers, 1994), Die Ausgesperrten (1980; Wonderful, Wonderful Times, 1990) and the autobiographically based Die Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher, 1988), in 2001 made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke. These novels, each within the framework of its own problem complex, present a pitiless world where the reader is confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey. Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry’s clichés seep into people’s consciousness and paralyse opposition to class injustices and gender oppression. In Lust (1989; Lust, 1992), Jelinek lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilisation by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture. This line is maintained, seemingly in a lighter tone, in Gier. Ein Unterhaltungsroman (2000), a study in the cold-blooded practice of male power. With special fervour, Jelinek has castigated Austria, depicting it as a realm of death in her phantasmagorical novel, Die Kinder der Toten (1995). Jelinek is a highly controversial figure in her homeland. Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Ödön von Horváth, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group.

  The nature of Jelinek’s texts is often hard to define. They shift between prose and poetry, incantation and hymn, they contain theatrical scenes and filmic sequences. The primacy in her writing has however moved from novel-writing to drama. Her first radio play, wenn die sonne sinkt ist für manche schon büroschluss, was very favourably received in 1974. She has since written a large number of pieces for radio and the theatre, in which she successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of polyphonic monologues that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit voices from various levels of the psyche and history to be heard simultaneously. What she puts on stage in plays like Wolken.Heim, Ein Sportstück, Das Werk, Ulrike Maria Stuart, Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel), Winterreise and others are less characters than “language interfaces” confronting each other. One of Jelinek’s most recent plays, Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns (The Merchant’s Contracts, a Comedy of Economics) written in 2008 before the fall of Lehman Brothers, deals with the mechanisms which lead to the global financial crisis.

  Jelinek has translated others’ works (Thomas Pynchon, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Labiche, Christopher Marlowe, Oscar Wilde) and has also written film scripts and an opera libretto. Alongside her literary writing she has made a reputation as a dauntless polemicist, with a website always poised to comment on burning issues.

  Literary Prizes and Awards include: The Young Austrian Culture Week Poetry and Prose Prize (1969), the Austrian University Students’ Poetry Prize (1969), the Austrian State Literature Stipendium (1972), the City of Stadt Bad Gandersheim’s Roswitha Memorial Medal (1978), The West German Interior Ministry Prize for Film Writing (1979), the West German Ministry of Education and Art Appreciation Prize (1983), the City of Cologne Heinrich Böll Prize (1986), the Province of Styria Literature Prize (1987), the City of Vienna Literature Appreciation Prize (1989), the City of Aachen Walter Hasenclever Prize (1994), the City of Bochum Peter Weiss Prize (1994), the Bremer Literature Prize (1996), the Georg Büchner Prize (1998), the Berlin Theatre Prize (2002), the City of Düsseldorf Heinrich Heine Prize (2002), the Mülheimer Theatre Prize (2002, 2004, 2009, 2011), the Else Lasker Schüler Prize (for her entire dramatic work), Mainz (2003), the Lessing Critics’ Prize, Wolfenbüttel (2004), the Stig Dagerman Prize, Älvkarleby (2004), The Blind War Veterans’ Radio Theatre Prize, Berlin (2004), The Franz-Kafka Literature Prize, Prag (2004), The Nobel Prize for Literature, Stockholm (2004).

  CAST

  Michael Cole (Victim/Chorus Member)

  Michael has a BA in Theatre Studies from Lancaster University. Theatre credits include: co-directed Oleanna by David Mamet, R.P McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Lancaster University Theatre Group), Ferdinand in a contemporary version of The Duchess Of Malfi (Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2011), Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life and Closed Doors (Lancaster University), a devised piece performed in Bowland Tower, Lancaster.

  Nina Hatchwell (Young Woman/Chorus Member)

  Nina trained at Italia Conti and completed her postgraduate acting diploma at Webber Douglas. She is an actress, writer, si
nger/songwriter and film director. She regularly trains with Neighborhood Playhouse director Scott Williams at the Impulse Company in London. Theatre credits include: Viola in Twelfth Night dir. David Salter, Beth in A Lie of the Mind dir. Stuart Wood, Hester/Lady Stuttfield in A Woman of No Importance and Nora in Stuetzen der Gesellschaften. TV credits include: Emily in Episode 5 series 3 of hit sitcom Arab Labor in Israel. Film credits include: 6 Tales of the Supernatural and Can’t Commit, both directed by Daniel Johnson, First Light dir. Tom Calder and A Morass dir. Shane Bordas. She recently starred in her writing/ directorial debut film You Look Stunning (UK entry for short film at the Cannes Film Festival 2011).

  Denise Heinrich Lane (Elfi Elektra)

  Denise Heinrich Lane trained in both acting and fine art. After leaving Webber Douglas she toured extensively with the original Cherub Company including: Chaste Maide in A Chaste Maide in Cheapside and Ophelia in Hamlet. Following a period at Theatr Clwyd she went to Goldsmiths then completed an MA in Critical Studies at Wimbledon. Theatre and performance credits include: Rocket Girl, The Green Lady in the Tree (Clissold Park, Stoke Newington Festival), Soft Nostomania (East End Collaborations), A Little Noiseless Noise Among The Leaves (Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington Festival). Work with the New Factory includes Kruchonykh’s futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, General Strike 1926 and Lenin in London playing Nadia Krupskaya. Other recent credits include: Sulpetia in Fletcher’s Custom of the Country and Carolina in Ioli Andreadri’s Best Friends Forever. She also co-wrote, devised and performed the Dada-inspired Le Donne in a wide variety of venues.

  Tom Lyall (Achilles/Sportsman/Chorus Leader)

  Tom trained at LAMDA and Ecole Philippe Gaulier. Theatre credits include: DEFRAG_ (Tom Lyall); The Devil Gets All the Best Tunes (Mighty Fin); ...Sisters (Headlong/The Gate); Money, Amato Saltone, The Tennis Show (Shunt); Longwave, Weepie, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Consolations (Signal to Noise); Escapology, Napoleon in Exile (CPT); I Wonder Sometimes Who I Am, Figments, The Last Man, Klamm’s Dream (Mischa Twitchin); Donkey Shadow (Petra’s Pulse); Slender (Mapping4D); The Terrific Electric (Boileroom); The Prometheus Experiment, Invitation to a Beheading (Discreet Theatre); I Am a Cloud (Song Theatre); Skinless (Six of One); Pelleas and Melisande (Beguiled Eye); Alice in Wonderland (Forbidden Theatre); Princess Plimsole (Incarnate); Closer to Ormsby (Glen Neath). He appears in the short films 12 Sketches on the Impossibility of Being Still and The Space Between Us (dir. Magali Charrier).

  Matt Ray-Brown (Hector/Man/Chorus Member)

  Matt trained with the Actors Company at the London Centre for Theatre Studies. Theatre credits include: A Do-Gooder (Albany Theatre), Murder Me Gently (Mumford Theatre), A Winter’s Tale and Romeo and Juliet (Saffron Walden), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ocras Theatre open air tour), Broken (Sir John Mills Theatre), Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge Touring Theatre) and The Bright & Bold Design (Jermyn Street). Film credits include: The Die is Cast, Shelter, FIT, Angel, Esther’s Funeral, The Adventures of George the Projectionist, Freeride. Matt has worked extensively on new writing for companies in London and East Anglia including Central School of Speech and Drama, Just Jones & Woven Theatre, Menagerie Theatre and WriteOn! in his home town of Cambridge. He is a fluent speaker of French and German, with credits in both languages, and is a regular voice for English as a Foreign Language teaching materials.

  Delia Remy (Woman/Chorus Member)

  Delia studied drama in Lyon, France, and came to London in 2003 to explore the possibilities of physical theatre. Theatre credits include: French diva in Many A Slipped (Sadler’s Wells), a young man, Tokubei, in Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Chikamatsu (Wilton’s Music Hall), the title role in Racine’s Andromaque and Sophocles’ Antigone, Strophe in Phaedra’s Love by Sarah Kane, Alice Freud in Sketching Lucian, Rosa Luxemburg in Landfill and the Rose in The Little Prince by St Exupery and P. Joucla. She has worked with visual artists (JocJonJosch) and photographers (Joschi Herczeg, Miki Soejima), and has taken part in several site-specific events by Secret Cinema (Battle of Algiers, The Third Man). Film and commercial credits include: Miss Rose in Hippie Hippie Shake (Beeban Kidron, Universal), the wife in a commercial against domestic violence created by London to Brighton director Paul Andrew Williams, Tranquillity in the emotional triptych Shard Drops (Akolight), Marina in Milk Man (Rumjam), French in The Proposal (Rumjam) and Emily in Vienna (Artgym). She also works as an assistant director and a translator.

  Giorgio Spiegelfeld (Andi/Chorus Member)

  Giorgio was born in Vienna, Austria. At the age of 18 he moved to Barcelona, Spain where he studied performance and film. Two years later he relocated to Cuernavaca, Mexico to continue his studies in performing arts for a year which he later completed at the Hochschule fuer Musik und Theater in Zurich, Switzerland. There he became a member of the Theater an der Sihl, he performed in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Preparadise Sorry Now (Schauspielhaus Zurich). After finishing his studies, he worked for two years as a resident actor at the Schauburg Muenchen. In 2009 he moved to London where he has been working as a freelance actor in theatre, film and TV. He has worked with directors such as Yoshi Oida, Fernando Meirelles, Fredi M. Murer and Beat Faeh.

  CREATIVE TEAM

  Vanda Butkovic (Director)

  Vanda graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 2009, specialising in Performance Arts. She was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where, prior to moving to the UK, she was the chief editor of the weekly culture television arts show Dom Kulture on Zagreb’s Open Television. She directed Holy Mothers by Werner Schwab (Pleasance Theatre, supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum London) and most recently, the UK Premiere of Woman Bomb by Ivana Sajko (Tristan Bates Theatre, London) for which she also translated the text. She has assisted and worked alongside numerous directors both in Croatia and the UK including: Paolo Magelli on the production of Wolves and Sheep by A.N. Ostrovsky, Julian Maynard-Smith on the production of Seventh Continent by M. Haneke, Edward Bond during his season at the Cock Tavern Theatre on his production of The Fool. She works regularly with students at the Central School of Speech and Drama, most recently on Living Sculptures, a movement piece performed at the Victoria and Albert Museum for their Friday Late Programme. Other theatre credits include: production assistant for The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (Arcola Theatre) and set designer for Cut Off, Woman Bomb and Red, Black and Ignorant.

  Penny Black (Translator)

  Penny has translated over thirty contemporary plays from the German for theatres including the Royal Court, the Gate, Arcola Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, and the National Theatre as well as theatres in the United States and Australia. Her translations include the award-winning The Reckless are Dying Out by Peter Handke and Yes, my Fuehrer by Brigitte Schwaiger as well as the highly-acclaimed Venezuela by Guy Helminger at the Arcola Theatre. Her first original play Making Babies, which looks at IVF and all aspects of fertility, was first produced in 2004 in Heilbronn in Germany, See No Evil, which looks at plastic surgery in terms of disability, was part of the Miniaturists at Southwark Playhouse and Sudden Silence, about the effects of stroke and the methods used in recovery, was seen in 2009 at the Arcola. She is presently adapting the novel Absent by the Scottish-Iraqi writer Betool Khedairi, the adaptation to be called Human Honey. Penny also works as dramaturg and has just finished working on an adaptation of Tosca’s Kiss by Kenneth Jupp for Annette Niemtzow of White Dog Productions, NYC. Penny previously translated one of Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Dramas – Jackie, together with Karin Rausch.

  Simon Donger (Scenographer and Video Designer)

  Born in France, Simon studied sculpture and scenography in England and Canada. His practice is particularly concerned with the dramaturgy of abstraction in spatial and lighting designs. Alongside creating his own installational work (the last of which was presented at Kinetica Art Fair 2011), Simon has designed for companies such as Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Marisa Carnesky, and institutions such as the V&A Museum and Bauhauslab. He is also an academi
c lecturer and researcher in scenography and performance arts at Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London, UK). He has also taught in institutions such as Leeds College of Art & Design (Leeds, UK) and the AA School of Architecture (London, UK). Currently completing PhD studies in scenography, Simon has presented his research in conferences in the UK, Czech Republic, Portugal and Switzerland. In parallel, he has published essays for Scenography International, Ashgate and the Prague Quadriennial Catalogue, as well as edited and contributed to a book on multidisciplinary French artist ORLAN (A Hybrid Body of Artworks, Routledge 2010).

  Berislav Juraic (Producer)

  Berislav Juraic is a creative producer with extensive international experience. Recent producing credits include: Peer Gynt Recharged (Riverside Studios, London and Delhi Ibsen Festival); The Moonflower Opera (Riverside Studios, London), the UK premiere of Woman Bomb by Croatian playwright Ivana Sajko (Tristan Bates Theatre, selected for 2011 Havana International Theatre Festival in Cuba) and the UK premiere of It’s Raining in Barcelona by leading Catalan playwright Pau Miró. He also produced the critically acclaimed Edward Bond Season (including a world premiere, two first revivals and two UK premieres) which was funded by Arts Council England; the musical Pins and Needles by Harold Rome (5 stars, Time Out Hit of the Year) and the UK premiere of Hotel Sorrento by Hannie Rayson, all at The Cock Tavern Theatre. As Executive Producer for London’s Little Opera House at the King’s Head Theatre, he produced: Cinderella and Pagliacci. Other London credits include: the UK Premiere of Jon Fosse’s Visits (Theatre Delicatessen) and Hedda (Riverside Studios, 2010). Credits abroad include: J.L. Lagarce’s Just the End of the World (Croatia, France); B.M. Koltès’ Tabataba (Croatia, France); Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (Croatia, France, S.Korea, Japan); El-Harrag, contemporary dance and circus project (Algeria, Croatia, Palestine, Jordan). He was also Artistic Director of FFRIK! International Theatre Festival in Zagreb, Croatia 2003-2008. During his tenure he invited the Belgian National Theatre, introduced African theatre and performance art to Croatian audiences and was awarded a prize by the National Commission for UNESCO for promoting intercultural dialogue.