ABSTRACT
Prolific Austrian stage writer Elfriede Jelinek (b.1946), who won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature, may be best known outside of the German-speaking theatre landscape for her novels. Yet in the past three decades, Jelinek has overwhelmingly written for theatre. Her short essays about theatre, however, merit more attention. Largely unpublished und untranslated, they offer sharp insights into a postdramatic conceptualization of theatre that calls out racism and misogyny and operates, at a Brechtian distance, outside a framework of plot and characters. “I don't want theatre,” Jelinek states in her 1983 essay “I want to be shallow,” written originally for the German-language theatre journal Theater heute. In this brief text, Jelinek sketches out, in her refusal of the actor as someone who tries to present a false “unity of life” on stage, tenets of what later will make up core theoretical positions of postdramatic theatre. Directly political and alert, Jelinek's multi-threaded textual surfaces ––both as theatre texts and texts about theatre––challenge theatre performers, production teams, and audiences alike to witness the structural violence of society, enacted through staged language.
