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bearers” and becoming “characters”, underlining the visible construction of characters that is also evident in Jelinek’s text itself. In this way, group dynamics sometimes emerge seamlessly from performer dynamics.
    Simon Donger’s ingenious set design, consisting of 140 Kilos of white toy stuffing, creates an ever-changing landscape in performance. Depending on its use and context in each scene, the “fluff”, as we nicknamed it, may bring up asscociations of snowy mountains, sportsfields or battlefield, the candyfloss sugar coating of the Olympics or the “stuff” that artificially enhanced bodies are made of. It is ultimately left up to the audience how they choose to read it at any moment. The toy stuffing, which also at times becomes a projection surface, also underscores the theme of the commercial manufacture of sports events by corporations and the media.
    True to Jelinek’s suggestion in the opening stage directions that “whoever appears on stage has to wear sports clothes – which leaves the field wide open for sponsors, does it not?”, the sports costumes of the performers (designed by Meni Kourmpeti) are uniformly sporting the logo of our official sponsor, Stiegl, a Salzburg brewery. As none of the multinational sports clothes manufacturers (“Adidas or Nike or whatever they are called, Reebok, Puma or Fila or so”) would have entertained the idea of sponsoring Sports Play due to adverse publicity, we considered it a certain delicious irony to have a brewery as a sponsor – especially since the Olympic Committee has (rather absurdly perhaps) banned all alcohol advertising during the games.
    From the start, the production introduces itself as a translation by giving the first word to Jelinek herself, as her voice is heard speaking the first lines. As a framing figure who introduces and concludes the play, Elfi Elektra serves as the author stand-in. While Schleef had cut Elfi Elektra’s opening speech altogether (hoping to make use of it in a future production), in our production this figure gains additional weight by being present on stage throughout, observing from the sidelines and occassionally stepping into the action. Her distance to the chorus also underscores one of the main dynamics in the play, the opposition between the solitary individual and the group or the mass.
    When working on the extended part of the Chorus, we treated the choric performance of the text as a musical composition, trying to avoid pyschological illustration and instead working with variations of rhythm, tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, elongations, repetitions, changes between male and female, tutti and solo voices etc. The result, we think, is a kind of Olympic feat of the performers, not only in terms of memorising Jelinek’s difficult linguistic gymnastics but in performing it chorically as an ensemble in a highly disciplined fashion. Generally, not only in the choric passages, we played with the concept of “performance under duress”: performers are having to deliver the challenging long monologues while going through exercise regimes, while being hassled or bullied by other performers or while being under the “fluff” or surrounded by it. All this amounts to a peculiar sporting discipline in itself.
    We worked on maintaining openness towards the audience, who are frontally addressed, implicated and appealed to by the performers in various ways throughout the piece. We aimed at blurring the lines between a sports event and a theatre event, in as much as the audience is often treated as a sports audience, for example, through the live reporting of sports results.
    Finally, we also strove to bring out the humour in the text. Jelinek, who considers herself a comic writer, often complains that many productions and frequently the reception of her plays miss the humour in it. Discovering the humour in her writing, we found, is