Oldal 195 [195]
OCR
MyTH, INTERCULTURALITY, AND RELIGION IN ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S AND FALK RICHTER’S WORK... the Dead!" is widely regarded as her magnum opus, as it brings together her interest in the concepts of “Heimat,” history, violence, feminism, and obscurity in a multilayered writing style, rich in comedy and intertextuality. This article, however, will discuss Jelinek as a playwright: she has written over thirty plays that have challenged stage conventions of theater production since the late 1970s. In Einar Schleef’s production of Ein Sportstück [Sports Play],'' for instance, which premiered at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1998, more than 100 actors were on stage: a gigantic choir spoke and performed workout moves for four and a half hours. Falk Richter is less renowned. The Hamburg-born playwright and director has become successful with his long, ornate stage productions, that are often multilingual and use different forms of media. He is thus in good company with other Jelinek directors, such as Einar Schleef, Nicolas Stemann or Christoph Schlingensief. His production of Am Kénigsweg has been critically acclaimed and was awarded the “Play of the Year” by the festival Miihlheimer Theatertage and the journal Theater Heute in 2018. His texts frequently focus on (homo)sexuality’s perception within society and aim to challenge sociosexual conventions on stage.” Am Konigsweg centers on a caricature of Donald Trump: a childish, selfish, and pantless king, who dances around with a blow-up globe, mimicking Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, and wears a Kermit-colored Ku Klux Klan hood while the Muppet Show’s favorite frog himself dances in the background. The play is strongly linked to contemporaneous socio-political events. This Trump-king stands in opposition to the choir that often, as a collective, performs as the voice of the blind poet. In this directorial decision, Richter picks up on Jelinek’s montage-style writing. Her texts are accumulations of quotes — in the case of Am Konigsweg: René Girard, Sophocles, Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, David Cay Johnston, and David Graeber along with, as Jelinek herself states at the end of her play, “other stuff” [noch so Zeug], such as newspaper articles etc.'* The choir’s speech is closest to Jelinek’s original text, while other characters, such as the King and a woman are added by Richter and his production team. This woman enters the stage from time to time to, in an almost Brechtian fashion, comment on and even explain the meaning of Jelinek’s text. She appears as an interpretive voice and is, as we will see, at times more choir-like than the choir itself. 10 Jelinek: Die Kinder der Toten, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1985. ! Jelinek: Ein Sportstück, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1998. 2 Falk Richter: Small Town Boy und andere Stücke, Berlin, Theater der Zeit, 2015. 3 Jelinek: Am Königsweg, 147. = * 193 ¢
