Dramaturgs’ Network’s DN Olympic Café: a pre-show conversation on ‘Sports Play’

In spite of her Nobel Prize and her towering success in continental Europe and abroad, this is only the third professional production of her work in Great Britain. Together with director Vanda Butkovic, dramaturg Karen Jürs-Munby, and translator Penny Black, we will discuss the problems and chances involved in staging Jelinek’s work in the context of current British theatrical culture. In particular, we will explore if director, dramaturg, and translator pursued any specific tactics to recontextualise the play.

Sports Play is a post-dramatic text that explores the marketing and sale of the human body and of emotions in sport. Elfriede Jelinek questions contemporary society’s obsession with fitness and body image and rejects the romanticized notion of sport as portrayed in today’s media. She considers sport as a mass phenomenon and as a medium for chauvinism and fanaticism – sport as war. At the same time this is one of Jelinek’s most personal plays in which she styles herself as “Elfie Electra” and mixes anger with self-irony.

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