Elfriede Jelinek (Photo: AP)
UPDATE (12 noon): Andrew Haydon reviews the production at his Postcards of the Gods today, with a one-word recommendation: Go.
On the occasion of the opening of her Sports Play by the Just a Must theatre company now touring England and Wales, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek participated in an interview with The Stage‘s Simon Stephens, published last Friday. A few samples:
It would seem absurd to be disappointed about something as global as the enthusiasm for sport. What disappoints me is rather the disdain for intellectual achievements in comparison to sports achievements. But who am I to complain about this? What I fear — and this is perhaps a kind of obsession — is the way the masses get charged up by sports events, something that at some stage gets out of control. [In Sports Play] I associate the metaphor of sport with war. 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 May 13, 1990, between the Croatian club Dinamo Zagreb and the Serbian side Red Star Belgrade at Maksimir Stadium [in the Croatian capital]. …
I don’t think of the audience for one second. Nevertheless, I am aware that I surrender my writing to a collective. … Unfortunately I can no longer watch my plays because I suffer from an anxiety illness and can no longer visit the theatre. … In earlier times, when I could still go, I did watch the plays but I didn’t learn anything, except that I had to find a different form than that of dialogue, but that was something I already knew beforehand. …
In Austria, there has always been a receptive audience for texts that critique language — texts that let language itself speak, as it were — from the language philosophy of early Wittgenstein and the language critic Karl Kraus through to the Vienna Group of the postwar era. In Germany I don’t see this. I drive language on, all the way to the worst pun — something I am always accused of — so that language has to say the truth, even against its will.
The full interview is available here. Sports Play was also recently published by Oberon Books and can be purchased here.