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Reviewed by:
  • Advanced Forms of Emptiness: Handke and Jelinek in Berlin
  • Paul David Young (bio)
Über Tiere (Concerning Animals), by Elfriede Jelinek, directed by Nicolas Stemann, Deutsches Theater-Kammerspiele, Berlin, May 2007
Spuren der Verirrten (Traces of the Lost), by Peter Handke, directed by Claus Peyman, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin, February 2007.

Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature, said she prayed that her compatriot Peter Handke would receive it instead and that he deserved it. Seeing plays by both of Austria's most respected if controversial living playwrights a few days apart after their 2007 Berlin premieres, I could not help but compare them and wonder whether Jelinek was right. At least superficially, one can understand Jelinek's gracious and self-effacing remarks about the relative worthiness of her writing compared to Handke's. Throughout his career, Handke has diligently and obstinately pursued a rigorously theoretical and intellectual form of writing for the theatre. Jelinek's texts, although somewhat obtuse, have a more obvious political agenda, and because of their overt sexual content provide the satisfaction of pornography. She celebrates the cheap joke or the clever pun as part of her style.

Jelinek's latest play starts on such a sweet and enticing note that one could forget momentarily the identity of the author and the political concerns that drive her work. Über Tiere (Concerning Animals) in the Kammerspiele at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, begins with the entry of a handsome, thoughtful-looking young man (Sebastian Rudolph) who shyly takes a seat at a desk and receives a letter that he tells us is from Jelinek. The contents of the letter, which he begins to read aloud, seem perhaps to have something to do with an affair, an acidic billet doux, and soon the young man is joined by a young woman who might be taken for the aggrieved lover and, likewise seated at a desk, reads on. The role of the woman opens up or, rather, is duplicated by other women, seated at desks, reading, as the play literally unfolds like origami, revealing more facets, expanding in dimensions, gaining a kind of universality by the duplication of gendered representations.

As in much of her work, Jelinek is here concerned with the inescapable oppression of women. Her early groundbreaking [End Page 76] Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte (What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband), imagined what might have ensued after Nora left Ibsen's doll house. Jelinek's post-liberation Nora, trapped in the infantilized role of seductress and lacking professional skills (except that of dominatrix) or the imaginative capacity to establish herself independently, returns in the end to her husband.

Similarly, economics and the historical patrimony of power along with the delusion of love subjugate the women of Jelinek's Über Tiere, confining them to a set of demeaning roles and narrative paths. The unfolding of the play beyond the opening tableau pushes the women explicitly into the role of prostitutes and their madam. This is of course a translation by Jelinek of the love relationship that begins the play and conveys her cold-eyed look at the meaning of love and its effects on women. The men, including the gentle, sensitive young man who opens the play, are transformed into clients in a bordello. On the way to their roles as clients, however, the production takes the men on a detour in gender identity. One of the two male actors is introduced first in garish drag and the young man of the opening undergoes an onstage makeover into a woman. The women are also given their turn to play at being men. This distribution and redistribution of speaking parts and gender roles further desentimentalizes the brutal text.

Gender identities resettle, though, and the men conduct a loud, boorish conversation in dialect, discussing the physical virtues of the women they are about to buy at the bordello. These men discuss the women as if they were animals and the men are themselves inhumanly animalistic in the way that they treat the women. The evening descends into a drunken, brawling orgy and concludes with the anomolous tableau of a middle-aged woman at...

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