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Sportstück , where she states in a mock resigned tone that “The author doesn’t give many stage directions, she has learned her lesson by now. Do what you like”. Most of Jelinek’s plays since Ein Sportstück have contained similar (non-)stage directions that surrender to and explicitly encourage the creative freedom of directors, designers and performers. In interview with Simon Stephens, Jelinek explains that, while she does have images in her head when she writes plays, “when a director does something completely different, this interests me all the more. It would [...] be boring for me if the director (and of course also the actors) were simply to stage and illustrate what I prescribe to them” (Jelinek 2012).
    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