Sports Play Read online

  Karen Jürs-Munby (Dramaturg)

  Karen gained her PhD at the University of Minnesota and is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. She has a longstanding research interest in the plays and theatre essays of Elfriede Jelinek and has published several articles and chapters on the subject. She is currently writing a book on Jelinek’s theatre texts and their postdramatic stagings by major German directors. More generally, her work is concerned with dramaturgies in contemporary theatre, especially the relationship between text and performance, the employment of new forms of acting and performing and the use of intermediality in live performance. She is interested in postdramatic theatre in all its forms and its relationship to politics, gender and memory. She translated and wrote a critical introduction to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal Postdramatic Theatre (Routledge, 2006). She co-edited (with David Barnett and Moray McGowan) the volume Das Analoge sträubt sich gegen das Digitale: Materialitäten des deutschen Theaters in einer Welt des Virtuellen (The Analogue resists the Digital: Materialities of German Theatre in a Virtual World, Theater der Zeit, 2007) and is currently co-editing a volume on Postdramatic Theatre as/or Political Theatre (forthcoming 2013). As a practitioner she has directed productions such as Peter Handke’s The hour we knew nothing of each other (2004), Opheliamachine (devised, 2005), Peter Handke’s Kaspar (2006) and LACluedo (devised, 2009, with Louise Ann Wilson).

  Meni Kourmpeti (Costume Designer)

  Meni was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. She received her Bachelor and Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Thessaly. After her graduation, she worked as an architect for two years in Thessaloniki. As an architect, she participated in various competitions related to recycling design, urban installations, photography and producing work out of recycled materials. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout Greece. She continues her art work in London, where most recently she participated in a group exhibition at the V&A museum and took part in the Clerkenwell design week. She is currently working on her MA thesis project on “body transformation”.

  Jari Laakso (Assistant Director)

  Jari trains at Central School of Speech and Drama, and he was born in Finland. Theatre credits include: director/creator/singer: London – París (Roundhouse), director Anything Goes (Helsinki), director/Billy Flynn Chicago (Helsinki); production manager: Accidental Festival 2012 (Roundhouse), Guide Below the Salt (Shoreditch Town Hall); performer: Living Sculptures (V&A Museum), Dr Watson The Hound of the Baskervilles (Espoo), Countess Roussillon All’s Well That Ends Well (Espoo).

  Adrienne Smook (Vocal Coach)

  Adrienne is a Canadian voice coach and actor currently undertaking an MA in Voice Studies at Central School of Speech and Drama. Her teaching placements have included Central School of Speech and Drama and RADA, and before moving to London she taught voice and speech in the Theatre Arts program at Rocky Mountain College in Calgary, Canada. Production credits include: movement/voice coach for Sage Theatre’s award-winning production of Hedwig and The Angry Inch. Recent acting credits include: The 39 Steps (Vertigo Theatre), The Penelopiad (Alberta Theatre Projects), and The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl (Sage Theatre). Adrienne is a graduate of the University of Alberta BFA Acting Program.

  Jessica Thanki (Stage Manager)

  BA in Theatre Production. Since graduating Jessica has stage managed the following shows: The Maid (Rich Mix, Odd Man Out Productions), Double Dutch Espresso (Tristan Bates Theatre, Theatre Waah), Measure for Measure (The Oval House, BADA), Maybe Father (The Young Vic, TALAWA), Behna 2010 (Kali Theatre co-production with Birmingham Rep and Black Country Touring), It Hasn’t Happened Yet (Tour, Liz Carr), Behna 2011 (Site specific, Kali Theatre), SQUID (School Tour, Theatre Royal Stratford East), Brixton Rocks (Tour, TARA Arts), Tagore’s Women (Southwark Playhouse, Kali Theatre Company). She company stage managed Black I (The Oval House Theatre, Kali Theatre Company), Gandhi and Coconuts, (Tour, Kali Theatre), Mustafa (Tour, Kali Theatre Company co-production with Birmingham Rep). Jessica was shortlisted for Stage Manager of the Year 2011 by the Stage Management Association.

  Ana Vilar (Lighting Designer)

  Ana is a London-based freelance lighting designer, re-lighter and consultant. She combines her career in lighting with photography, art and design, exploiting these skills throughout her practice. From 2010 she has been an active member of an exclusive lighting company, Urban Electric, working as a Lighting Engineer and Product specialist in neon installation. Recent work in dance and theatre includes relighting Lucy Hansom’s design for James Wilton dance company’s piece Cave at the Northern Ballet theatre, Leeds, lighting design for The Typewriters’ piece The Dead Can Dance at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in London and lighting design for Outside Puppets show The Thinker at the Roundhouse, London. She has a BA(Hons) in Photography from School of Arts, Huesca, Spain and BA in Theatre Practice (Lighting Design for Performance) from Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

  “I am a sort of justice fanatic”

  An interview with Elfriede Jelinek by Simon Stephens

  This interview was conducted by email in May 2012 on the occasion of the upcoming English-language premiere of Sports Play by Just a Must theatre company.

  Simon Stephens: Sports Play is extraordinary. It’s funny and savage and satirical and beautiful. As the Olympics arrive in London it also feels enjoyably timely. I can’t work out whether it is born out of faith in human potential or fear of human potential. The play seems to fly because it is carved from both faith and fear, or if not fear then disappointment. What disappoints you about our cultural obsession with sport? What inspires you about the same thing?

  Elfriede Jelinek: I don’t think you can call it disappointment. It would seem absurd to me to be disappointed about something as global as the enthusiasm for sport. What disappoints me is rather the disdain for intellectual achievements in comparison to sports achievements. But who am I to complain about this. It makes me feel like a worm! Rather, what causes me fear (and this is perhaps a kind of obsession) is the way the masses get charged up through sports events, something that at some stage gets out of control. [In Sports Play] I associate the metaphors of sports with those of war. The unrest in the former Yugoslavia after all started with a football match that then became charged in nationalist ways and ended in violence. This was the game on the 13 May 1990 between the Croation club Dinamo Zagreb and the Serbian side Red Star Belgrade in Maksimir Stadium.

  SS: It is no coincidence that the culture that first gave us law and democracy also gave us theatre. Theatre seems to excavate the contradictions between justice and law. It strikes me that all plays are born out of a need for justice in the face of the law. That same culture also gave us Sport. What, for you, is the cultural role of Sport?

  EJ: Well, it could be the other way round, possibly it can only be determined by a photo finish. The oldest surviving tragedy, The Persians by Aeschylus, beats Attic democracy by a fraction. The emergence of the latter is dated between the Persian wars and the Peleponnesian wars. Yes, dear Simon, we, the dramatists got there first! It’s interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy. And after all, “the Persians” are so great because they give back humanity to the opponents, or rather they don’t deny it to them (and not only in order to stress their own martial achievements in victory). At the time [I wrote Ein Sportstück], I did not realise that football, for example, can also play an incredible political role (and a peacemaking role – as much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace; football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or rather a moment of acceleration, a catalyst), in a good way as well as a bad. We don’t even need to start talking about the psychoanalytical component. I see sports as everything: transfer, counter transfer, yes, also catharsis, as in Greek tragedy. When I wrote the play I still underestimated this.

  SS: The play, as much as it is a consideration of sport seems also t
o be a consideration of the relationship between individual authenticity and social or political or moral compromise. It plays out against the axes of sex and the family to excavate these themes. These are themes I recognise from your novels. Are you aware of thematic fascinations? Do you consciously return to interrogate the same ideas again and again? What would you say those themes are?

  EJ: I think that most authors are obsessed by an idea that they keep modifying and varying. With me that’s certainly the case. I am a sort of justice fanatic and I always have to give a voice to those who get a raw deal. In Sports Play, for example, that also includes the mothers who in a way are dispossesed of their children who they lose to the sports fields, although this is often best for both parties. Or, to put it differently: When I see that the boat is overloaded on one side, I have to run to the other side. And sex is of course not a private affair either but always mirrors dominance and servitude. Almost compulsively, so to speak, I always have to include the social implications of things in my writing.

  SS: Is the process involved in writing a play different to the process involved in writing novels?

  EJ: In spite of the fact that my plays often look like prose, as they consist of long blocks of monologues, they are actually not prose. My plays are texts written to be spoken, while prose narrates. Plays are designed for collective reception, prose for individual reception. So you can’t simply say that my plays are a kind of prose since they don’t narrate anything. They talk. They speak. Although recently I’ve noticed that the differences are blurring. My prose is increasingly becoming “speaking”.

  SS: Do you plan your plays or do you depend on instinct or intuition born out of the moment of writing?

  EJ: No, I don’t plan. That would be boring to me. I always let my texts lead me, they know themselves where they want to go. Keeping a dog for decades has prepared me for this. You have to go where the creature, the text, wants to go. And sometimes it drags you along behind it, taking you somewhere completely different than where you originally wanted to go.

  SS: Do you imagine your plays on a stage or in a theatre as you write them? How physical or pictorial is your playwriting, or is it entirely linguistic?

  EJ: Well, I do have images in my head when I write plays, that suffices for me. When a director does something completely different, this interests me all the more. It would also be boring for me if the director (and of course also the actors) were to simply stage and illustrate what I prescribe to them. Although I do say how I imagine the play, it is all the more wonderful for me when I learn to see my own text with new eyes, through theatre practice. A play is never the product of the author, it is at most half, if at all, his or her work. It only comes into being through collaborative teamwork. That’s what’s so interesting about theatre.

  SS: Theatre uses time differently to how it is used in the reading of a novel. We can read a novel in one sitting or over the course of days or even weeks. A play we watch in one go. I use narrative to manipulate or control time in my plays. Narrative is more elusive in your work. How do you think of the role of time in the creation of a play?

  EJ: I don’t rack my brains about that at all. I think time plays an important role in dialogues because timing here is very important. In order to learn that as well, I translate comedies, and also Oscar Wilde, whom I update and adapt though. So there they are again, the dialogues. But I myself have not been writing any dialogues for a very long time, actually since I began writing plays, because I want to hand over the time element, too, to the performers and the director. I want something new to emerge, something where my text only participates as one element among many. I provide only an offer, not even a master copy of a text.

  SS: Do you think about how your plays effect collections of people or do you write for individual audience members?

  EJ: No, not at all. I don’t think of the audience for one second. Nevertheless I am aware that I then surrender my writing to a collective.

  SS: What do you learn from watching your plays?

  EJ: Unfortunately I can no longer watch my plays because I suffer from an anxiety illness and can no longer visit the theatre. That’s why I lack this experience. In earlier times, when I could still go, I did watch the plays but I didn’t learn anything, except that I had to find a different form than that of dialogue, and that was something I already knew beforehand.

  SS: It’s thrilling to have a play of yours produced in Britain. We’re shamed by your absence from our major stages. How Austrian do you consider your writing to be? How Germanic?

  EJ: I’m sorry, too, that British stages don’t seem to have an interest in my texts. I think that’s also due to the different tradition, I simply don’t write any “well-made plays”, I wouldn’t be able to either, even if I tried. Because I live a very reclusive life, owing to my illness, I wouldn’t even know anymore how people talk to each other nowadays. Therefore I have to let ideas and ideologies compete against each other – also a sports metaphor. In any case, I come from the Austrian literary tradition, which is really quite different from the German tradition. In Austria, much more than in Germany, there has always been an audience and a reception for texts that critique language, texts that “let language itself speak”, so to speak. From the language philosophy of the early Wittgenstein on, via the language critic Karl Kraus, down to the Vienna Group of the postwar era. In Germany I don’t see this. I drive language on, all the way into the worst pun (which is something I am always accused of), so that language has to say the truth, even against its will. Actually, this should work in Britain since puns, the play with words, are ever present in its literature (and not just since Joyce). I know very little about Cockney but what I do know is enough to admire the incredible linguistic creativity of this distinct and autonomous “language”. My plays, I therefore believe, would not be entirely out of place in Britain, even though they are simply not “normal” theatre plays.

  Translation of Elfriede Jelinek’s responses by Karen Jürs-Munby

  AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM LONDON

  The Austrian Cultural Forum London is delighted to support the production of Sports Play by Elfriede Jelinek on the occasion of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

  The ACF London is the Cultural Section of the Austrian Embassy in London and promotes cultural contacts between the UK and Austria by organizing events and supporting artists and projects in the fields of music, performing arts, visual arts, literature, film and science. We provide a venue in central London for recitals, lectures, readings, film screenings, conferences and exhibitions, while also cooperating with various partners throughout the UK.

  The ACF London offers free admission to all of its in-house events, which are organised in cooperation with Austrian and Austrian-based artists. In addition to hosting and organising events we offer our visitors a library with a range of books on Austrian literature, music, art history, as well as politics, philosophy and psychology. Included in our collection are numerous works by Elfriede Jelinek. Books in English and German are available to the public and we invite you to come and find out more about this celebrated Austrian writer.

  You can find out more about our events and projects, and join our mailing list at www.acflondon.org.

  Austrian Cultural Forum London

  28 Rutland Gate

  London SW7 1PQ

  T 020 7225 7300

  [email protected]

  Just a Must company was founded by producer Berislav Juraic and director Vanda Butkovic in 2009 to promote intercultural and cross-disciplinary cooperation in the British performing arts arena, and to stage in the UK contemporary and innovative European works. The company’s focus is on postdramatic theatre. Recent productions include Woman Bomb at the Tristan Bates Theatre (2011), El-Harrag in Algeria, Croatia and Middle East (2009-10), Holy Mothers at the Pleasance Theatre (2009).

  For more information about the company, please visit www.justamust.com

  The production of Sports Play is sponsored by Stiegl �
� the art of brewing.

  Just a Must company would like to thank:

  Peter Mikl

  Matt Fenton & the team at Live at LICA

  Matthew Rooke, Daniel Cox, Tamiko Mackie & the team at The Maltings Theatre & Cinema

  Andy Eagle & the team at Chapter Arts Centre

  David Lockwood & the team at The Bike Shed Theatre

  Francis Alexander & the team at Chelsea Theatre

  Miles Gregory

  James Tyson

  Claudia Nussbaumer

  Bob Collins

  ELFRIEDE JELINEK

  SPORTS

  PLAY

  Translated by Penny Black

  With translation assistance and

  a foreword by Karen Jürs-Munby

  OBERON BOOKS

  LONDON

  WWW.OBERONBOOKS.COM

  First published in 2012 by Oberon Books Ltd

  521 Caledonian Road, London N7 9RH

  Tel: +44 (0) 20 7607 3637 / Fax: +44 (0) 20 7607 3629

  e-mail: [email protected]

  www.oberonbooks.com

  Ein Sportstück © Elfriede Jelinek 1998

  Translation copyright © Penny Black 2012

  Foreword copyright © Karen Jürs-Munby 2012

  Elfriede Jelinek is hereby identified as author of this play in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted her moral rights.