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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; Ü ber 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 comesfrom 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