Sports Play Read Online Free PDF

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 individualsinto 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 onpopular 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