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strictly reserved. Applications for performance, including professional, amateur, recitation, lecturing, public reading, broadcasting, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages, etc., must be made before rehearsals etc. begin, in Elfiede Jelinek’s, case to Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Hamburger Strasse 17, 21465 Reinbek, Germany. No performance etc may be given unless a licence has been obtained.
    All rights whatsoever in this translation are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before rehearsal to Alan Brodie Representation, Paddock Suite, The Courtyard, 55 Charterhouse St, London EC1M 6HA, ( [email protected] ). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained.
    You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
    PB ISBN: 978-1-84943-402-7
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-638-0
    Cover image by Simon Donger
    Printed, bound and converted
by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
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Foreword
    by Karen Jürs-Munby
    T he work of Elfriede Jelinek will be more familiar to Anglophone readers through her prose texts. Novels such as Women as Lovers, Lust , and The Piano Teacher , which was adapted into an award-winning film by Michael Haneke in 2001, have made Jelinek internationally famous. Yet, she has also worked in many other “disciplines”, including radio plays, poetry, film scripts, texts for opera and most of all for theatre. In 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “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” (Nobel prize website 2004). It is all the more surprising that to date only a handful of her plays have been translated into English, and of these even fewer have been staged in Britain. 1 Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we hereby present to the reader Elfriede Jelinek’s Sports Play , the translation of Ein Sportstück , commissioned by the Austrian Cultural Forum, London for the English-language premiere to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics.
    Jelinek’s prolific output of plays over the last decades has been multifaceted and has tackled a large number of increasingly epic topics. It includes early feminist plays such as Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaft (What happened after Nora left her husband or Pillars of Society , 1979), Clara S., musikalische Tragödie (Clara S.,a musical tragedy , 1982) and Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen . Wie ein Stück (Illness or Modern Women. Like a play , 1987); Burgtheater (1985), a satirical attack on the collusion of the famous Vienna theatre with the Nazi regime; Wolken.Heim (Clouds.Home , 1988), a montage of quotes of famous German thinkers and poetsabout the discourse of German national identity; Steckn, Stab und Stangel. Eine Handarbeit (Rod, Staff and Crook – Handmade , 1995), an exploration of the way the Austrian media trivialized the killing of four Roma men; the Prinzessinnendramen: Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V (Princess Dramas: Death and the Maiden I-V , 1999-2002), a deconstruction of the myth of the princess in all its forms; Das Werk (The Works ,