Coinciding with the London 2012 Olympics, we present the English language premiere of Sports Play by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.
Translated by Penny Black
Directed by Vanda Butkovic
Dramaturgy by Karen Jürs-Munby
Set, lights and costumes by Simon Donger
Produced by Berislav Juraic
English Language Premiere Part of UK tour
Coinciding with the London 2012 Olympics, London based performing arts company Just a Must in partnership with Austrian Cultural Forum London is staging the English language premiere of Sports Play by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.
Sports Play (written in 1998) is a post-dramatic text that explores the marketing and sale of the human body and of emotions in sport. Jelinek questions contemporary society's obsession with fitness and body image and rejects the romanticized notion of sport as portrayed in today’s media. She considers sport as a mass phenomenon and as a medium for chauvinism and fanaticism – sport as war. At the same time this is one of Jelinek’s most personal plays in which she styles herself as “Elfie Electra” and mixes anger with self-irony.
Elfriede Jelinek (b. 20/10/1946) is an Austrian writer. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her ‘musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power’. Ein Sportstück (Sports Play) premiered at the Burgtheater, Vienna in 1998.
The production will be accompanied by the first dedicated conference on Elfriede Jelinek in the UK entitled “Jelinek in the Arena” taking place at Lancaster University 11-13 July 2012.
More information on the conference here: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/event/3747/
Please note our box office has limited opening hours. The box office closes on Friday 23rd March, re-opening on the 23 April until the end of May 2012.
Presented in partnership with Austrian Cultural Forum London: www.acflondon.org
http://www.justamust.com
