Sports Play Read Online Free PDF Page B

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” containsintertextual 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