Sports Play

Elfriede Jelinek, Penny Black

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781849436380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático británico

With translation assistance and a foreword by Karen Juers-Munby
First produced in 1998 at the famous Vienna Burgtheater, the remarkable and provocative Sports Play by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek is a postdramatic theatrical exploration of the making, marketing and sale of the human body and of emotions in sport. It explores contemporary society's obsession with fitness and body culture bringing into sharp focus our need to belong to a group, a team or a nation. Sport is seen as a form of war in peacetime.

The author doesn’t give many stage directions, she has learned her lesson by now. Do what you like. The only thing that has to be kept are the Greek Choruses, as individual, or en masse; whoever appears on stage, has to wear sports clothes – unless otherwise specified – which leaves the field wide open for sponsors, does it not? The Chorus, if possible, should all be the same, all Adidas or Nike or whatever they are called, Reebok, Puma or Fila or so.

What I want from the Chorus is the following: the leader of the Chorus should be connected to a sports channel by means of an earpiece and should inform the audience of all the interesting sports events or latest results, according to their own assessment. Or the leader of the Chorus could come up to the lights and announce what he/she wants to say by writing it on boards that he/she then holds up, or, the slightly more expensive version, one of those electronic boards with neon letters, where you put the information in via computer. So the leader of the Chorus (male or female) needs to be someone who can improvise well, will go up to the footlights and interrupt the play by passing on the latest news, which the Chorus should then take up and repeat chorically. And to do it in a manner that interrupts the plot – there isn’t one anyway.

With regards the stage itself, it could perhaps look like this: it could be divided right down the middle in two sections: a dismal sports stadium towers above us, there are railings to keep the two sets of fans off each others’ throats. On either side of the railings stand policemen with their backs to the railings watching the faces of the two sets of fans who want to break through, push towards each other, hit the railings, sometimes burst through the railings. The two crowds are the two enemy masses, whose attacks on each other are what the play is about, or maybe it is about something else.

ELFI ELEKTRA:

Peace at last. The rivers, coloured red by my father’s blood, have run clean again, or maybe a new war is about to start with mama? What do I care. Meanwhile and for a while the behaviour of the masses is drawing my attention. So many people with personal drive. Then, all at once, as if the stroke of an invisible clock had smashed something in their skulls and reset them to an imaginary time, they are all ticking to the same beat. They grab their sports equipment and thrash each other, smash the bowls that previously they’d held up in front of a prettily-set breakfast table or in the pub, in order to take a swig from their neighbour’s. Well, cheers! Now they’re giving him one, and how! Bottoms up! Heads down! Trout float past the bridges with their bellies up. They’re no longer to be considered for the tourist industry, because tourism consists of consideration, and here there’s really nothing more to see. Move along, to the next village. The fish are dead and gone. Please move along! Do you know what’s going to happen to the river in my nearest neighbourhood tomorrow, or at the latest, the day after? Do you know what they’ll do with it, these inhumans? They want, by means of artificial artlessness, to make it unique, more unique at least than all those people who hang up their ties on a hook to change into their uniform – sports gear. To this end people must first destroy their unique nature, or maybe this is how it appeared in the first place? It happened so everyone could really absolutely look uniform. Like soldiers. Jeans, T-shirts, baseball caps. The same thing’ll happen to the poor river: a completely new set of kit for the Olympics in the discipline “bank bursting”. Out of it the masters of the river create natural artlessness – or better still, artful naturalness. Admittedly, even if a new bed is sewn for the river, it remains the old one, the malicious one with the hard bandages that won’t be nice for its joints. First it has to be environmentally-protected before it can become a river again. Of course it moves much more happily in its new garb. Something always has to happen before we get round to making the rivers reasonable. Please, I don’t care, I’m just saying, although it makes no difference what I say: this river has been flowing for a good century in its well-built concrete river bed, at high watermark it rises by about thirty centimetres and begrudgingly lets it go again afterwards. And now they want to rip out its bed, let it go back to nature. The river, as in the old days, can once again meander, and its banks should have perfect suction and be shapely at the same time, perhaps not precisely shapely, but at least biologically-fitted to the body of the landscape. With enhanced suction at its core. I’m looking forward to it, although I do have some objections against it. Its swooshing will make a sound like dogs howling, no, not quite that loud, of course every child at play will drown it out. Those lost on the battlefield have also been given their provisionally final monument – it’s been fiercely fought over, as though it wasn’t already a reminder of cruel, unimaginable battles. Many have, and I too, have objections. Who against whom? No one listens to me anymore, because when I speak, I contort myself as self-pityingly as I do during my individual gymnastic lesson with the latest self-assembled music: a goddess, who cannot and cannot bear children. So I’ll sit back down. Doesn’t matter. The army sets forth having destroyed the land. The last ones crawl.

Underneath the earth they lie close together. In fact some of those still waging war today go so far as to say that their one-time enemies, snuggled up tight, are still hostile, so they can continue to threaten even the dead. “They don’t threaten us anymore but we can still threaten them.” It’s the same with the water. It doesn’t threaten us anymore, because even though it’s constantly on the move, it’s dead, but we threaten it with what it is, namely dynamic, quickly rushing-forward nature! We threaten to return it to its very nature, but the river has that already, in different software versions in fact. I have accessed my own versions like a thief. You just can’t give the right present to some children. No one can seek out a nature different to the one they already have. Dead means dead, papa! And that includes you, too, there’ll be no mercy. We, the living, don’t need any corpses nearby, we want to eat our cake without being watched. Stalin and Hitler have been tidied away, General Mladić had a stroke and still doesn’t know if he’ll be alive when, what’s said here, will remain unsung. Yet he’ll be a celebrity for some time to come. And what on earth will happen to that well-known poet Karadžić, who’s at least as good as my friend Fredi K and whose lips stand as wide apart as his hair? He’ll probably only perform occasionally, or might not be allowed to perform at all following the reduction in the body of his own people, which really wasn’t necessary. He reduced the body of other peoples more though, which seemed to him so essential that he couldn’t wait for them to die of their own accord. They did complete all their exercises beforehand however. Nothing lasts forever, everything comes to an end, only a sausage has two. Please applaud all these gentlemen nicely because this is the first and the last time that I’ll be talking about them. Even though you may have expected more commitment from me on the matter. Well. I’m deliberately not going to get involved. I will accept this applause even though those heroes of history deserved it more, the ones who are almost forgotten today, because we’ve already got new ones in stock. One moment, I just have to unpack them and accuse them of craving recognition – but it’s dying on my tongue. Making accusations is something I do all the time, it’s my trademark, but the accusations were already tame when I let them out of my cage, naked wild beasts on all fours who I alone made so wild. Cuckoo! I find objections as comfortable as a double-edged sword in my belly.

I presently enter the house and prepare it for the photo. Now I take the pot with deep sympathy off the stove, no, the deep pot with sympathy, and stir them in, the new heroes, against whom I have lots of objections, of course. It might be better if others than I reported about the next lot already pushing for war. After all, my own volumes have been reduced due to illness, loss, humiliation and depression – I could offer a good explanation by pointing to the example of my papa, and may still do so. Despondency. Constantly feeling insulted. Lack of responsibility. I don’t oppose anyone anymore, least of all my neighbours in Austria, who don’t wish to increase their numbers. I deduce that from the fact that they’ve closed their borders, and will only reopen them tomorrow to their own personal car consumption, yum, long live freedom from lead.

Tell me, is everything being guarded properly? Out with the dead, in with the living! Oh, they’re already in? All the better, now we can close the doors with our life-bestowing spirit again. Nothing but sport and sport and sport on our minds! Our numbers are declining as the majority sit in front of the television, and those who are late are not let in. In the face of this mass of people, the conductor might feel disturbed because they didn’t come to him, and equally we, the audience, we are an overcritical mass, too, standing opposite another mass that is equally critical but is not in the right. But we don’t need to criticise anyone anymore, because these sportsmen and women coming on stage, heavens, are a triumph of will and beauty. I had no idea that bodies could be built. A pity then they lost any sense of depth – apart from the divers. Oh God, my jokes are shallow today! They don’t even dampen my fingers as I turn over my terrible pages for you. Doesn’t matter. Read me anyway! But don’t get too close, because I’m always so angry I’d like to kick someone myself.

You can no longer say that our masses are growing, and that’s the reason our neighbours on the other side of the border want to fight us. They’re quite quiet now, after all that life was played out underground in extreme conditions, and over the next few years the earth’s surface will have to be re-done so that people can enjoy it again. Tons of rubbish. What sort of a people is that! Layer by layer is being carried away until there’s nothing left of it. Even disappearing is a high-performance sport, perhaps the highest of them all, because performance in this discipline cannot be measured. My papa is no longer leaving an echo, even though he tapped his best side out on my blackboard yesterday, the side he always spoke with. Oh well, he was usually quite quiet. As for mama and myself, we’re at peace now. There’s the offer of some movement. Let’s see. I look questioningly at my mother, because despite the rage in my work I’m not being heard, why not? Now we’ve kept quiet for so long we’ve finally deserved some movement, she says. Why are you such a demanding girlie? Why are you looking into life with such expectant eyes? You’re forgetting the most important thing: giving people pleasure!

From this moment on, that pile of enemy dead lying around out there somewhere no longer bothers me. No, on the whole I’m not waging war against anyone anymore, apart from mama of course. I’ve finally decided to do it. She’s the red rag in my hand. That Viennese river over there, no, sadly you can’t see it from here, will snuggle into its soft new bed, I guarantee that personally. Now I finally have time to look at it properly, after I’ll have walked for half a kilometre. But if anyone were to steal my elegant clothes, I wouldn’t find that funny! As far as I’m concerned the river, hands on hips, will be weighed in at a steady tempo on scales that on my side have already reached the floor – it really doesn’t go any lower. All others have ultimately been considered too light. Virtually extinct riverside plants are being reactivated from nature’s reserves and marvellously styled, they’ll populate its sleeping quarters, I’ll go and take a look at it all on Sunday. Oh dear, they haven’t even started making a sickbed for the river. The apartment for the fallen fighters however is already ready, the magazine “More Beautiful the Natural Way”, oh, no, I mean of course “More Natural the Beautiful Way” is reporting on it, but only very few people will have actually read it. Of course I’ll read it, I have taste and I hate any rival who also possesses it. Sadly there are women everywhere. It’s appalling that I’m not the only one.

God’s slain will lie all in a row from one end of the earth to the other. For once I’ve nothing against it. How unbelievably courageously my cheeks glow as I write, how furiously, I could kill you all – once I’ve finished writing and have nothing left to do. Yet if I experienced death myself, I’d see everything a little differently. They’ll be neither lamented nor raised nor buried, the dead. Those who, when alive cowered in a corner of the room shivering, pulling out their hair for fear of going out – well, that’s something those of us in our leather jackets needn’t fear! – they have to lie in the fields and turn to muck. Excuse me please, hopefully that was my final gaffe, and not even my own. It was someone else’s. I’ve only brought this derailment into the game because just here the gravel track has been somewhat eaten away by storms, and my rails got a little eroded without me really noticing. Without these rails I cannot press forward, my knees and my shinbones are too soft. Until something happens I’ll just repeat everything over and over again to make sure. I’m not some far off riverbank, I’m not quite leak-proof! There’s no one left, and so we’ll just leave him lying there until the doctor comes. Too late for Papa, but quite in time for me.

A WOMAN in her mid forties and a YOUNG SPORTSMAN enter and kick around a bundle lying on the floor, they throw it to each other and hit it with bats.

The bundle becomes bloody. During the following as it is being hurled around, it continues to do everyday tasks, as long as it is allowed to: it clears up, adjusts something, reads, just everyday things, even tries to watch television. It ought to let itself be annoyed only temporarily, the person-bundle, in between times it should act perfectly normally.

The WOMAN (the only exception in the play alongside the ‘old woman’ who in terms of clothes is wearing a bourgeois elegant outfit, still trying to look fetching. Just normal). She switches on a silent television set on which we can see masses of people going wild at a sports event. The texts that follow are spoken in whatever manner by male voices, it doesn’t matter, while the people on stage at first only lip-synch with it, or not. It can also be done quite differently. This is just one possibility amongst many, any of them is fine by me.

WOMAN: (While kicking the bundle.)

Son, please, son, just this once don’t go to the sports field! I get all worried inside that I won’t see you again. Early this morning – reluctantly as usual – you kissed me, but you felt superior to me while doing so. No matter how sweet you were being I feel you’re eluding me, you’re being snatched away. Yet for ages now I have found ways and means to imprint myself on you, like a piece of paper full of triumphant youth protection measures, even though you grew up a long time ago and tower above me like a wall with signs stuck on it. I squat in front of it now in the hope of being let in, and your skis threaten to fall on top of me from the cupboard. When did we last go skiing together and you injured me with your point of view! You still undertake exciting activities, yet they never refer to me. Your T-shirts portray you as a day-walker, guarded every second by a watch that’s been calibrated to do just that. Soon a handshake will suffice when we meet. One day I won’t hear from you any more because you’ll have had a terrible accident. Dynamic young people are just not the slowest! After your accident I’ll be under the impression of a tragedy. A couple of days previously you’ll have said to your companions, before going up in the ski lift, that you’ve got everything you need for the season, skis, shoes, bindings. Everything will happen so quickly that it’ll be difficult to grasp. On the fast lane to death. You’ll have raced to death on the way home from go-karting. An overtaking manoeuvre will be your doom. Your car will smash against an oncoming bus. Ten bus passengers will be injured, but what’s that in comparison to your death! This victory over your body will not be a one-day wonder, but a comeback on a detour via death. You can finally establish yourself at the top and stay there. You lie there whilst the country flies by. Yes. You and your friends. One day you’ll have run round the world and then where do you go? That’s why you work in your ski teams, so that you don’t remain undiscovered.

Your friends, they’re playing fast and loose with themselves, without the necessary forethought. Now you’re silent, repay maturity with immaturity, as nations were wont to do before they united, just so they could go for each other with greater zest. All of that merges seamlessly with my gentle suffering. Fortunately I’m not aggressive, nor are my girlfriends. We talk about themes and ask for respect, the name of the discount that we apply to the themes after we’ve chosen them. Supra-successful female poets give us lectures. They splash around in themselves because it seems so warm there, and a little lightly-scented foam sprays from around the mouth. They wipe it away. Then they say what they have to say: courage, sorrow, dismay, multiculturalism. Always the same thing. This woman runs her wet index finger along her reading circle and believes that is sufficient sport. Boredom already begins to pull at your cradle, son, and you’re certainly no slacker. You want to get out, if necessary with the dog. Look at this other dedicated woman! She is touching the edges of the mixing bowl that surrounds her. Moreover she’s surrounded by friends, which improves the feedback. A chirpy hearth and housewifely sounds. We women are mainly amateurs, yet we diligently help all to pass on what one of us is saying, we just don’t know who.

Yes, even amateurs can feel satisfaction if they’re right. Your friends mock my fear of losing you. And you mock with them. At first a reasonable debate amongst yourselves, it often leads to bloody confrontation. I know that. Yet still I drill holes in your defences. As a result I don’t sleep for nights at a time. Although I’m an expert in arguments, I write them up in my notebook and then wipe them away, first with wet tears, then with dry. Why have I suddenly become the enemy in your eyes, how did this come about?

Where does it come from, your permanent citrus freshness that you use to take my breath away? What, from me, from my own cupboard? I just want to know where you are at this moment. Your sports friends find this ridiculous. You harvest applause from your friends when you mock me. Soon I won’t be allowed to look at you in public. No one looks at where the mother is standing anyway. A mother determines the appropriateness of her children, only then to be disappropriated herself. Sport is at its most effective when it takes place in public – when photos of the stars are emblazoned on the front pages and peep out of the back pages that hide them, only to reveal them all the better. Soon I...