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The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek's ‘Sprachflächen’

This article for ‘Performance Research’ grew out of an international conference on ‘Performing Literatures’ (Leeds, July 2007) that addressed the divide between literary scholarship and performance-oriented research. Significantly, it is still one of only a few scholarly studies of Elfriede Jelinek’s theatre texts and their stagings that are available in English, despite the fact that Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 and that her plays have been widely staged and discussed on the continent. It thus introduces Jelinek’s writings for and on theatre, as well as some of the critical debates surrounding her work to an Anglophone readership – also by offering some of this primary and critical material in translation for the first time.

Secondly, building on my translation and introduction of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre in 2006, the article places Jelinek’s writings and their stagings by major German theatre directors such as Thirza Brunken, Einar Schleef and Nicolas Stemann in the wider context of the relationships between text and performance in postdramatic theatre. With this it taps into a debate that was rife at the conference – and indeed the wider discipline – at the time, as Stephen Bottoms acknowledges in his editorial.

Countering a widespread misperception that postdramatic theatre is by definition theatre beyond the use of text, my contribution demonstrates that postdramatic theatre cannot to be equated with ‘anti-textual’ or ‘non-text-based’ theatre. Rather the inherent conflict tensions between written text and performance, which directors like Stemann openly exhibit in their productions of Jelinek’s ‘resistant texts’, can come to the fore and figure large in postdramatic theatre. As such, the article seeks to significantly further our understanding of some of the complex relationships between text and performance in postdramatic theatre by looking at prominent stagings of Jelinek’s theatre texts.