Sports Play (4 page)

Einar Schleef's original premiere of
Ein Sportstück
at the Vienna Burgtheater was a monumental, landmark production. He staged the play with 142 performers (including 29 children who in one scene simply played football on stage). The “short version” for the premiere in January 1998 lasted five hours, the later long version seven hours. Schleef adhered to Jelinek's stipulation that, “The only thing that has to be kept are the Greek Choruses, as individual, or en masse...”, by deploying choruses throughout the performance in multiple ways. Singing, rhythmically speaking and stomping, Schleef's chorus formed a massive stage presence against which individual figures had to assert themselves. Schleef not only presented the sections indicated as spoken by the “chorus” as such but also turned the figures of “perpetrator”, “sportsman” and “diver”, as well as “Elfi Elektra” into chorus groups of various sizes.

Furthermore, Schleef took on the challenge of Jelinek's offer of a carte blanche by inserting his own scenes into the production. A prologue consisting of a historical speech from the 1888 reopening of the Burgtheater, spoken by the oldest actor at the theatre, and the old Austrian national hymn sung by the chorus anchored the performance in the historical environment of the Burgtheater. Moreover in the long version there were large film projections of silent scenes based on the
Oresteia
, filmed in various locations within the Burgtheater, in its cellar corridors, on its grand staircase and in its attic spaces, that extended the production in a site-specific way and made full use of Schleef's “home advantage”. The insertion of whole scenes from Hugo von Hofmannsthal's
Elektra
and Heinrich von Kleist's
Penthesilea
– both German neo-classical tragedies that are referenced in Jelinek's text – strengthened the tragic conflict of the sexes present in the play.

Schleef's general choric approach was closely connected to his theoretical concerns developed in his book
Droge Faust Parsifal
, namely those of a “return of woman into the central conflict” and a “return of tragic consciousness” (Schleef 1997: 10). In
Ein Sportstück
this choric form articulated in a ritualistic way the conflict between individual and group that is so central to Jelinek's play. Through the use of large choruses and durational exercise regimes, his production created a strong physicalisation which in turn charged the spoken language to an almost unbearable degree. Especially the famous marathon “Sportsmen scene”, for which a 40-strong chorus in identical old-fashioned 1930s sports outfits kept up a strenuous “fight choreography” for 35 minutes while repetitively shouting fragments of the text to a beat of eight, hit the audience with a palpable fascist energy. Other scenes, in which four naked “perpetrators” beat up an equally naked “victim” or the image of naked men hanging from the rafters of the theatre by their ankles like dead cattle, had a visceral shock effect.

Finally, just like Jelinek inscribed herself into the text in the figure of “Elfi Elektra” and the “Authoress”, Schleef himself inscribed himself in the performance text by appearing in person to speak the final monologue, which was printed on a giant cloth spread over the whole stage (on the third night Jelinek herself spoke the text and in the long version both Schleef and Jelinek walked over the text together). Schleef's vulnerable, partly improvised performance and the fact that each evening was different, contributed enormously to the event character of the production.

Understandably, Schleef's impressive monumental production has somewhat overshadowed the production history of
Ein Sportstück
and few directors and dramaturgs have dared to tackle the play since for fear of comparisons. But Schleef's quasi-operatic form of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk that at the same time deconstructs this Germanic tradition, has not been uncontroversial, either. Gitta Honegger, for example, has argued that “Schleef's mega-mise-enscène dangerously (re)activates what it exposes” (Honegger 1999: 15). In any case, Schleef's production is certainly not the only way in which the play can be staged and should not deter theatres with fewer than 142 performers and less than multimillion budgets from staging the play.

Just a Must's English-language premiere of
Sports Play
, directed by Vanda Butkovic, is timed to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics and before it Euro 2012, i.e. a time when there is definitly “nothing but sport and sport and sport on our minds”, as Elfi Elektra says in the opening speech. This seemed a unique opportunity to commision a translation of the play and introduce it to a British audience.

As a dramaturg, one of my first tasks, in close collaboration with the director, was to shape Jelinek's massive text into a condensed performance script more closely suited to Shakespeare's famous “two hours‘ traffic of our stage”. Jelinek's plays are nearly always cut quite heavily for performance. Even Schleef's five-hour version of
Ein Sportstück
did not use the unabridged text, as one might suspect, but acquired its length because he inserted his own extraneous material. As director Nicolas Stemann once said rather flippantly about the necessity of adapting a text by Jelinek: “You don't cut it with a pencil as with other theatre texts where you may draw some lines. No, with Jelinek's texts you have to cut with a machete!” (Stemann 2006: 67). With this exhortation in mind, we took heart to make sometimes painful cuts to the text. The principles that guided us were a focus on the main theme of sport and on themes that were recognizable and resonated with British audiences, while nevertheless trying to preserve the main compositional architecture of the play. Somewhat reluctantly we decided to cut the long monologue of the Old Woman, based on serial killer Elfriede Blauensteiner, because we felt that her “sport of killing” was rather tenuously linked to the main theme and the audience would not have the necessary background to make sense of it. We made the dramaturgical decision to split Achilles' and Hector's scene into three shorter appearances, each time playing a different sport, thus turning them into a kind of running “sideshow”. We also heavily condensed a long section of individual “perpetrators” and “sportsmen” into a devised final choric scene (as Schleef had done with his “Sportsmen chorus”).

Vanda Butkovic decided to stage the play with a group of seven performers, six of whom in addition to individual roles also act as the chorus and are present on stage throughout the play. The “chorus” changes from being commentators, to “team”, to crowd. Performatively we also played with shifting between
the performers playing “themselves”, being “text bearers” and becoming “characters”, underlining the visible construction of characters that is also evident in Jelinek's text itself. In this way, group dynamics sometimes emerge seamlessly from performer dynamics.

Simon Donger's ingenious set design, consisting of 140 Kilos of white toy stuffing, creates an ever-changing landscape in performance. Depending on its use and context in each scene, the “fluff”, as we nicknamed it, may bring up asscociations of snowy mountains, sportsfields or battlefield, the candyfloss sugar coating of the Olympics or the “stuff” that artificially enhanced bodies are made of. It is ultimately left up to the audience how they choose to read it at any moment. The toy stuffing, which also at times becomes a projection surface, also underscores the theme of the commercial manufacture of sports events by corporations and the media.

True to Jelinek's suggestion in the opening stage directions that “whoever appears on stage has to wear sports clothes – which leaves the field wide open for sponsors, does it not?”, the sports costumes of the performers (designed by Meni Kourmpeti) are uniformly sporting the logo of our official sponsor, Stiegl, a Salzburg brewery. As none of the multinational sports clothes manufacturers (“Adidas or Nike or whatever they are called, Reebok, Puma or Fila or so”) would have entertained the idea of sponsoring
Sports Play
due to adverse publicity, we considered it a certain delicious irony to have a brewery as a sponsor – especially since the Olympic Committee has (rather absurdly perhaps) banned all alcohol advertising during the games.

From the start, the production introduces itself as a translation by giving the first word to Jelinek herself, as her voice is heard speaking the first lines. As a framing figure who introduces and concludes the play, Elfi Elektra serves as the author stand-in. While Schleef had cut Elfi Elektra's opening speech altogether (hoping to make use of it in a future production), in our production this figure gains additional weight by being present on stage throughout, observing from the sidelines and occassionally stepping into the action. Her distance to the chorus also underscores one of the main dynamics in the play, the opposition between the solitary individual and the group or the mass.

When working on the extended part of the Chorus, we treated the choric performance of the text as a musical composition, trying to avoid pyschological illustration and instead working with variations of rhythm, tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, elongations, repetitions, changes between male and female, tutti and solo voices etc. The result, we think, is a kind of Olympic feat of the performers, not only in terms of memorising Jelinek's difficult linguistic gymnastics but in performing it chorically as an ensemble in a highly disciplined fashion. Generally, not only in the choric passages, we played with the concept of “performance under duress”: performers are having to deliver the challenging long monologues while going through exercise regimes, while being hassled or bullied by other performers or while being under the “fluff” or surrounded by it. All this amounts to a peculiar sporting discipline in itself.

We worked on maintaining openness towards the audience, who are frontally addressed, implicated and appealed to by the performers in various ways throughout the piece. We aimed at blurring the lines between a sports event and a theatre event, in as much as the audience is often treated as a sports audience, for example, through the live reporting of sports results.

Finally, we also strove to bring out the humour in the text. Jelinek, who considers herself a comic writer, often complains that many productions and frequently the reception of her plays miss the humour in it. Discovering the humour in her writing, we found, is actually something that comes relatively easy to British actors, as there is such a great tradition of punning language play, irony and satire in this country.

Jelinek once remarked that translations are books that nobody had missed before they were there. Having now worked with
Sports Play
in rehearsal for several weeks, we would certainly not want to miss it anymore. We hope that in watching the English premiere and reading the full-length text printed here you, too, will discover what a treasure you have (not) missed all these years since its original publication.

Canetti, Elias,
Crowds and Power
(1981 [1962]), trans. by Carol Stewart, Middlesex/New York: Penguin.

Fiddler, Allyson (2001), “Theorizing and ‘Playing' Sport in Elfriede Jelinek: Some Notes on
Ein Sportstück”
, in W.E. Yates, Allyson Fiddler, John Warren,
From Perinet to Jelinek: Viennese Theatre in its Political and Intellectual Context
, Oxford/New York: Peter Lang, pp. 273-283.

Honegger, Gitta (1999), “Beyond Berlin, Beyond Brecht: Offenbach, Horváth, Jelinek and their Directors”,
Theater
, 29, pp. 4-25.

Honegger, Gitta (2006), “How to get the Nobel Prize without really trying”,
Theater
36 (2), pp. 5-19.

Janke, Pia (2002) (ed.), “
Die Nestbeschmutzerin: Jelinek & Österreich”
, Salzburg/ Vienna: Jung und Jung.

Jelinek, Elfriede (2006), “I am Trümmerfrau of Language”, interview by Gitta Honegger,
Theater
36 (2), pp. 21-37

Jelinek, Elfriede (2012), Interview with Simon Stephens, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby. Published in this volume.

Jürs-Munby, Karen (2009), “The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre. Performing Elfriede Jelinek's Sprachflächen”. In:
Performance Research 14 (1)
, Performing Literatures, pp. 46-56.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006 [1999]),
Postdramatic Theatre
, trans. and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby, London: Routledge.

Nobel prize entry (2004) on laureate Elfriede Jelinek,
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2004/

Schleef, Einar (1997),
Droge Faust Parsifal
, Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp.

Stemann, Nicolas (2006), “Das ist mir sowas von egal! Wie kann man machen sollen, was man will? – Über die Paradoxie, Elfriede Jelineks Theatertexte zu inszenieren”,
Stets das Ihre: Elfriede Jelinek Arbeitsbuch 2006
, ed. Brigitte Landes, Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 62-68.