Elfriede Jelinek’s Dramaturgy

Abstract

Since its foundation (between 1901-2021), the Nobel Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel have been awarded to women 58 times. Among them is the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek, who 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.” (Swedish Academy; NobelPrize.org).

Elfriede Jelinek considered being the most influential living playwright of the German language world. Jelinek's work includes novels, poetry, theatre texts, radio plays, essays, translations, screenplays, musical compositions, etc. Her texts so far have been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Russian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Georgian, Romanian and many other languages. Despite her
widespread acclaim, Jelinek's work remains highly controversial to some literary and theatre critics for her visions and writing style – as she, from the very beginning, denied using the conventions of traditional literary techniques in favour of linguistic experiments. It
is in this respect that Jelinek is interesting.

In the present article, she is seen as a feminist writer whose texts often deal with gender relations, female sexuality, and popular culture (based on her most notable plays, such as „What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband; or, Pillars of Society”, „Clara S.” and „Bambiland”). In almost all of her texts, we encounter the author's uncompromising sincerity, which is often accompanied by the theme of cruelty. In terms of cruelty and sincerity, the work of Elfriede Jelinek (and at some point, her biography) reminds us of the English playwright and theatre director Sarah Kane, whose work explores similar themes: violence, cruelty, gender relations, pornography, consumer society criticism, and mental disorder.

Although Elfriede Jelinek is an internationally acclaimed playwright, it is problematic to find her theatre texts in English. It is even harder to find them in Georgian since, unlike Elfriede Jelinek's novels, her theatrical texts are not yet available in the Georgian language. Hence Georgian theatre still has a long way to go before discovering Jelinek's dramaturgy.