Sports Play Read online

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

  All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved. Applications for performance, including professional, amateur, recitation, lecturing, public reading, broadcasting, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages, etc., must be made before rehearsals etc. begin, in Elfiede Jelinek’s, case to Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Hamburger Strasse 17, 21465 Reinbek, Germany. No performance etc may be given unless a licence has been obtained.

  All rights whatsoever in this translation are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before rehearsal to Alan Brodie Representation, Paddock Suite, The Courtyard, 55 Charterhouse St, London EC1M 6HA, ([email protected]). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained.

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  PB ISBN: 978-1-84943-402-7

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-638-0

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Bibliography

  Translator’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Foreword

  by Karen Jürs-Munby

  The work of Elfriede Jelinek will be more familiar to Anglophone readers through her prose texts. Novels such as Women as Lovers, Lust, and The Piano Teacher, which was adapted into an award-winning film by Michael Haneke in 2001, have made Jelinek internationally famous. Yet, she has also worked in many other “disciplines”, including radio plays, poetry, film scripts, texts for opera and most of all for theatre. In 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power” (Nobel prize website 2004). It is all the more surprising that to date only a handful of her plays have been translated into English, and of these even fewer have been staged in Britain.1 Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we hereby present to the reader Elfriede Jelinek’s Sports Play, the translation of Ein Sportstück, commissioned by the Austrian Cultural Forum, London for the English-language premiere to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics.

  Jelinek’s prolific output of plays over the last decades has been multifaceted and has tackled a large number of increasingly epic topics. It includes early feminist plays such as Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaft (What happened after Nora left her husband or Pillars of Society, 1979), Clara S., musikalische Tragödie (Clara S.,a musical tragedy, 1982) and Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen. Wie ein Stück (Illness or Modern Women. Like a play, 1987); Burgtheater (1985), a satirical attack on the collusion of the famous Vienna theatre with the Nazi regime; Wolken.Heim (Clouds.Home, 1988), a montage of quotes of famous German thinkers and poets about the discourse of German national identity; Steckn, Stab und Stangel. Eine Handarbeit (Rod, Staff and Crook – Handmade, 1995), an exploration of the way the Austrian media trivialized the killing of four Roma men; the Prinzessinnendramen: Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V (Princess Dramas: Death and the Maiden I-V, 1999-2002), a deconstruction of the myth of the princess in all its forms; Das Werk (The Works, 2003) about the use of forced labour during the construction of Austria’s largest power plant at Kaprun; the plays Bambiland (2003) and Babel (2005) about media representations of the war in Irak; Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006) about the legacy of the 1970s Red Army Fraction terrorists in Germany; Über Tiere (About Animals, 2007), about female and male desire, prostitution and sex trafficking, partly based on wiretapped phone conversations of a Vienna escort agency; Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) (Rechnitz (The Exterminating Angel), 2008) about the shooting of 200 Jewish forced labourers during a party at Rechnitz Castle at the end of the Second World War; Kontrakte des Kaufmanns. Eine Wirtschaftskomödie (The Merchant’s Contracts. An Economic Comedy, 2009) about the recent financial crisis; Kein Licht (No Light, 2011) about the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima; and the new “secondary dramas” Abraumhalde (Slag heap, 2011) and FaustIn and out (2011), which both comment on the Fritzl case in Amstetten (among others) and are designed to be performed alongside the classical dramas of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Faust respectively.

  The above list may give a glimpse of the subject matter of Jelinek’s plays and the way in which they both respond to current affairs and deal with repressed shameful histories. However, this list hardly captures the innovative and challenging nature of Jelinek’s form of playwriting. Her plays tend to lack a dramatic plot, psychological characters and sometimes even designated speakers. They have consequently been associated with the paradigm of postdramatic theatre (Lehmann 2006: 18 and 24). Her texts, which on the page often look like prose, consist of blocks of monologues made up of montages of playfully and deconstructively manipulated quotes from popular culture, the media, philosophy, poetry, classical drama and scientific literature, intermixed with what sounds like the author’s own voice. Politically they intervene at the level of language and the way in which it affects our thinking. Jelinek here comes from an Austrian tradition of language philosophy and criticism, spanning from early Wittgenstein to Karl Kraus to the postwar “Wiener Gruppe” (Vienna Group) of avant-garde experimentation with language. Originally trained as a musician and a composer, Jelinek works with language in a musical fashion. Her rhythmic and polyvocal, relentlessly punning and alliterating form of writing makes language dance – and in doing so destabilises ideology and causes reflection.

  As such, Jelinek’s texts present enormous challenges to directors and performers and, not least of all, to translators of her work. Gitta Honegger remarked that “Jelinek’s linguistic deconstructions and the specificity of her critique of Austrian politics, traditions, and perversities have made translations nearly impossible” (Honegger 2006: 5). “Nearly” is the operative word here, however, and Honegger’s own fine translations are sufficient proof that translations of Jelinek’s texts are possible. In working with the translator Penny Black on the translation of Sports Play, I found that the unpredictable nature of Jelinek’s way of writing constantly keeps you on your toes and can easily trip you up. Faced with her poetic twists and turns and frequent shifts in registers, translators have to think on their feet and become creative “co-writers”, finding analogous puns where these are impossible to translate literally, or even coming up with new puns and alliterations in the spirit of the text when the opportunity presents itself. They have to detect quotes and intertextual references to popular culture and literature and track down existing English translations of philosophical terms (Heidegger being a favourite candidate in Jelinek’s plays). And, last but not least, translators of her theatre texts have to find a rhythm and a voice that lends itself to performance.

  Ein Sportstück (1997), which we have translated as Sports Play (but which could also be rendered as A Sports Piece, A Sports Play or even A Sporting Play), represents Jelinek’s most systematic treatment of the theme of sport, though by no means her first, as sport is an obsessively recurring topic throughout her work (see Fiddler 2001: 273). The play is an ambitious
and multilayered text that draws on a number of different sources and intertexts. At the heart of it is an exploration of sports as a mass phenomenon, especially of the drives and mechanisms that turn individuals into uniformly behaving crowds with a potential for violence. In an acknowledgement at the back of the published German version of the play, Jelinek cites Herbert Jäger’s criminological study Makrokriminalität (Macro Criminality) as an influence. The play text itself also contains multiple intertextual references to novelist and philosopher Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (1960, translated as Crowds and Power in 1962), in which he analyzes how crowds establish and preserve their mass identity in opposition to a second crowd: the living versus the dead, men versus women, friend versus foe.

  From the outset, Jelinek associates the metaphors and rituals of sports with those of war. Rather than regarding sports as a civilising force, she presents it as an “embodiment of war in peacetime and, ultimately, a symptom of proto-fascist enthusiasm for the strong, healthy body and condemnation of the weak and the sick” (Fiddler 2001: 274). Furthermore, she sees it as a potential training ground for future real wars. At the time the play was written, the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia were fresh on her mind. In a recent interview with Simon Stephens, conducted on the occasion of the English language premiere of Sports Play, Jelinek explains that: “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 13th May 1990 between the Croation club Dinamo Zagreb and the Serbian side Red Star Belgrade in Maksimir Stadium” (Jelinek 2012). As the recent violent and racist crowd behaviour during Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine has shown, football events can still act as a prime catalyst for nationalist and fascist group dynamics. Nevertheless, Jelinek now acknowledges that at the time she wrote the play she “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” (Jelinek 2012).

  Sports Play is furthermore concerned with the cult around the body and around sports personalities in the mass media. As someone who admits to being a TV addict and who often scribbles notes while watching television, Jelinek here typically draws on popular media discourses around Austrian sports personalities (such as tennis player Thomas Muster or formula one racing driver Gerhard Berger). For her, the daily consumption of sports personality gossip contributes to dangerous popular sentiments and underpins a sense of national identity and xenophobia that goes hand in hand with the public playing-down of a history of widespread support for national socialism in Austria after the annexation in 1938. More immediately, the play is a direct “critique of the current political situation in Austria and the growth in popularity of the right-wing, populist party, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), with its fit, telegenic former leader, Jörg Haider” (Fiddler 2001: 274).

  As in most of her plays, Jelinek is concerned to give a voice to the oppressed and the victimised, the second-class citizens and the silenced who are usually denied a voice. In Sports Play it is not only the (un)dead (the war dead, the holocaust victims, the dead father, the sportsmen who died an early death due to steroid abuse) and the victims of crowd violence who are remembered and given a voice. It is also the mothers, who are abandoned and dispossessed when their children leave them for the “war of sports”. The figure of the mother, “Woman”, is not treated with unambiguous sympathy, however, as it is also she who first “urged” her son on to join a sports team. An association with Erika Kohut’s ambitious mother in The Piano Teacher (and with Jelinek’s own mother) seems no coincidence.

  Despite confronting global problems and dynamics, Sports Play is also considered one of Jelinek’s most personal plays. The hybrid figure “Elfi Elektra” serves as her alter ego and frames the play. Jelinek here deals with her own “Elektra complex”, battling her controlling mother and mourning the death of her father, who, having survived the war as a Jew only because of his special expertise as a chemist, later became mentally ill and died in an asylum when Jelinek was in her early twenties (Honegger 2006). While this autobiographical material (to which Jelinek has recently returned in her play Winterreise (Winter Journey, 2010), may at first seem incidental to the main themes of the play, it importantly juxtaposes the remembrance of the weak, vulnerable and socially excluded with the images of the healthy, fit and idolised sportsmen. The final speech by the “authoress” contains intertextual references to Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” and can be read as an inversion of it: where Plath compares her father to a fascist, Jelinek addresses hers as a victim of anti-semitism. Through the figures of Elfi Elektra and “Young Woman”, Jelinek also addresses – not without self-irony – her role as an embattled angry moralist within society. In Austria she has been branded as a “Nestbeschmutzerin” (see Janke 2002), i.e. someone who “fouls her own nest”, a traitor to her country – something that has changed only gradually after she won the Nobel prize.

  The open and unconventional form of Jelinek’s texts has given directors the freedom to deploy a huge variety of different directorial strategies and in the course of it inevitably made them into creative co-authors. German director’s theatre (Regietheater), which is notorious for its creative and often irreverent treatment of play texts, took up the challenge of her texts with a vengence (Jürs-Munby 2009). By the time Jelinek wrote Ein Sportstück in 1997, a new generation of directors and dramaturgs such as Jossie Wieler, Thirza Brunken, Frank Castorf and the dramaturg Tilman Raabke had begun to find their own directorial, dramaturgical and performative approaches to staging Jelinek’s plays (Honegger 2006: 7). While Jossie Wieler deliberately went against the grain of Jelinek’s declared rejection of psychological theatre and came up with a quasi-naturalistic setting and acting style in his staging of Jelinek’s text montage Wolken.Heim, Frank Carstorf’s direction of Raststätte, oder sie machens alles (Services, or, They all do it) was marked by satirical playfulness, brutal imagery and absolute lack of respect for the author. The staging became famous for its final image of a large, mechanical sex doll (including blinking nipples and genitalia), recognizable as a caricature of Jelinek, that mumbled incomprehensible monologues at the audience for a good 10 minutes. According to Gitta Honegger, “Jelinek maintains that Castorf’s direction, though utterly offensive, was absolutely correct for this play” (Honegger 2006: 9).

  These kind of experiences with directors of her plays perhaps explain Jelinek’s ironic opening stage directions in Ein Sportstück, where she states in a mock resigned tone that “The author doesn’t give many stage directions, she has learned her lesson by now. Do what you like”. Most of Jelinek’s plays since Ein Sportstück have contained similar (non-)stage directions that surrender to and explicitly encourage the creative freedom of directors, designers and performers. In interview with Simon Stephens, Jelinek explains that, while she does have images in her head when she writes plays, “when a director does something completely different, this interests me all the more. It would [...] be boring for me if the director (and of course also the actors) were simply to stage and illustrate what I prescribe to them” (Jelinek 2012).

  Einar Schleef’s original premiere of Ein Sportstück at the Vienna Burgtheater was a monumental, landmark production. He staged the play with 142 performers (including 29 children who in one scene simply played football on stage). The “short version” for the premiere in January 1998 lasted five hours, the later long version seven hours. Schleef adhered to Jelinek’s stipulation that, “The only thing that has to be kept are the Greek Choruses, as individual, or en masse...”, by deploying choruses throughout the performance in multiple ways. Singing, rhythmically speaking and stomping, Schleef’s chorus formed a massive stage presence against which individual figures had to assert themselves. Schleef not only presented the sections indicate
d as spoken by the “chorus” as such but also turned the figures of “perpetrator”, “sportsman” and “diver”, as well as “Elfi Elektra” into chorus groups of various sizes.

  Furthermore, Schleef took on the challenge of Jelinek’s offer of a carte blanche by inserting his own scenes into the production. A prologue consisting of a historical speech from the 1888 reopening of the Burgtheater, spoken by the oldest actor at the theatre, and the old Austrian national hymn sung by the chorus anchored the performance in the historical environment of the Burgtheater. Moreover in the long version there were large film projections of silent scenes based on the Oresteia, filmed in various locations within the Burgtheater, in its cellar corridors, on its grand staircase and in its attic spaces, that extended the production in a site-specific way and made full use of Schleef’s “home advantage”. The insertion of whole scenes from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea – both German neo-classical tragedies that are referenced in Jelinek’s text – strengthened the tragic conflict of the sexes present in the play.

  Schleef’s general choric approach was closely connected to his theoretical concerns developed in his book Droge Faust Parsifal, namely those of a “return of woman into the central conflict” and a “return of tragic consciousness” (Schleef 1997: 10). In Ein Sportstück this choric form articulated in a ritualistic way the conflict between individual and group that is so central to Jelinek’s play. Through the use of large choruses and durational exercise regimes, his production created a strong physicalisation which in turn charged the spoken language to an almost unbearable degree. Especially the famous marathon “Sportsmen scene”, for which a 40-strong chorus in identical old-fashioned 1930s sports outfits kept up a strenuous “fight choreography” for 35 minutes while repetitively shouting fragments of the text to a beat of eight, hit the audience with a palpable fascist energy. Other scenes, in which four naked “perpetrators” beat up an equally naked “victim” or the image of naked men hanging from the rafters of the theatre by their ankles like dead cattle, had a visceral shock effect.