Agon, conflict and dissent:Elfriede Jelinek's Ein Sportstück and its stagings by Einar Schleef and Just a Must Theatre

This article explores the directorial approaches of Einar Schleef’s radically choric staging of Elfriede Jelinek’s play Ein Sportstück at the Burgtheater (1998) and Vanda Butkovic’s English language premiere of Sports Play (Just a Must, 2012) in the context of the ancient Greek concept of the agon and the conflict between group and individual. A reworking of agon and conflict is not only central to Jelinek’s text but even more so to Schleef’s dramaturgy. This latter is read in terms of Schleef’s theory about the disappearance of the chorus from German theatre and woman from the centre of the conflict. While in terms of its content Jelinek’s play critiques society’s valorization of sportive agon and its relationship to collective violence and warfare, on the level of theatrical communication both Schleef’s and Butkovic’s stagings show that the play revives an agonistic tradition creating a public space for political dissent

Parastic politics:Elfriede Jelinek's 'secondary dramas' and their staging

This chapter explores the politics of Elfriede Jelinek’s innovative new ‘secondary dramas’, texts designed to be performed alongside canonical dramas such as Goethe’s Faust or Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and disrupt them in performance. It engages with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s conception of the political as a disruption of political consensus and applies it to the relationship between the ‘no longer dramatic’ text and the dramatic tradition. With reference to Michel Serres and Jelinek’s own theoretical writing, her strategy is read as a form of deliberately ‘parasitic politics’ where the secondary drama simultaneously feeds off the classical drama and contemporary reality, in order to disrupt consensual views and make marginalised voices heard

Jelinek Über-Setzen:Ein internationaler Vergleich

This discussion with Inge Arteel, Emmanuel Béhague, Karen Jürs-Munby and Artur Pełka, moderated by Norbert Bachleitner considered the different translation strategies that can be adopted when translating texts by Elfriede Jelinek, as well as the cultural translation strategies when staging her plays in other countries. The participants from Belgium, France, Poland and the United Kingdom considered how Jelinek's plays resonate differently in different countries and whether there are 'universal' dimensions to the reception of her themes. They also considered how divergent theatre cultures in different countries tend to influence translations to the stage with a predominance of European productions within the framework of traditional "Sprechtheater". They identified a need for more experimental productions in different performative art forms outside of theatre houses, such as site-specific installations

Der fremde, faszinierende, paradoxe Ort Theater: Gedanken zu Elfriede Jelineks neueren theatertheoretischen Essays

The fact that Nobel prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek has from the beginning of her career not just written texts for the theatre but also theoretical essays about the theatre makes her especially interesting for Theatre Studies, and many of her earlier essays have been widely discussed and have strongly influenced the reception and staging of her works. This chapter is devoted especially to her more recent essays since 2003 which have thus far been neglected in Jelinek scholarship. With close reference to five essays and touching on others, I observe a general shift in tone in her recent essays compared to the earlier essays which were hostile to theatre as a medium. As a result of her plays being more frequently staged by major German and Austrian directors who have found their own creative key to her different texts, Jelinek has over time discovered the theatre as a special medium and extraordinary place with paradoxical forms of artistic communication that have much to offer her as a writer in the struggle against dominant power relations and especially the power of the public media. I argue that her recent essays are important not just for an understanding of Jelinek’s theatre texts and their realization in the theatre but that they also contain many insights that are transferrable to the dynamic between text and staging in contemporary postdramatic theatre generally. After a contextualizing introduction, individual sections of the chapter offer detailed theoretical analyses of: Jelinek’s essay “In Mediengewittern” (=In Media Storms) arguing for theatre’s special potential in critically reflecting on other media; the essay “Das nicht anschaubare Bild” (=The not-viewable image) about the paradoxical relationship between text and stage; the essay “Keine Frage” (=No Question) about the ‘non-existent author, the public and the paradoxical speaking of the actors’; and about the essays “Theatergraben” (=Orchestra Pit) and “Die Leere öffnen” (=Opening the emptiness), which deal with the productive tensions and ‘contra-laborations’ between playwright and director

"The proof is in the pudding":Britische Theaterstücke "zwischen" Drama und postdramatischem Theater

This contribution begins by analysing the British critical reception of Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre (translation 2006), firstly in terms of the national theatre landscape in the UK, which diverges from theatre in German speaking countries with respect to the dominance of commercial theatre and the privileging of playwrights over directors, and secondly in terms of Lehmann's heterogeneous theorisation of the role the text in postdramatic theatre. The contribution subsequently explores how selected plays by Sarah Kane and Tim Crouch can be described as 'no-longer-dramatic' texts that call for postdramatic theatre forms, while at the same time retaining some dramatic elements and referring to the dramatic tradition. The chapter proposes that it is often the plays at the interface of the dramatic tradition and postdramatic theatre that are especially political