Read Sports Play for Free Online Page A

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 betweenthe performers playing “themselves”, being “text