‘he wants to fetch me, I guess, if need be as a shadow, he does not tolerate anything being taken from him.’

Jelinek at the Coffin Factory

On Taking Theatre Outside Its Traditional Institutions

With SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt) Elfriede Jelinek is following in the footsteps of Ovid, Monteverdi and Sigmund Freud. She has embarked on an expedition into the unconscious mind, to the site where constraints are placed on what we believe to be our freedom. Most shadows are cast where the light of reason shines brightest. The Enlightenment gave rise to new myths.

One of these myths was the perfect couple; man and woman complementing each other perfectly, the complete division of the world into binary units. Its hero is Orpheus, the singer from classical antiquity whose magical voice stops rivers flowing and defies death.

But how does Eurydice feel about him wanting to use his song to bring her back to life from Hades? The most beautiful lover’s oaths in the history of music have been written for her, but her own voice has seldom been heard over the centuries. Is this just another case of a man silencing a woman who has bowed to being an object of male desire?

Towards the end, the female voices in Elfriede Jelinek’s work answer that question with a firm no. Which doesn’t always come easy, bearing in mind they are constantly being tempted with compliments, vows to be faithful, entitlements to a pension and a ‘well-stocked wallet of love’. Mr Right seems to be coming closer but no one goes to meet him. The romantic comedy doesn’t materialise. Here, Hades is no realm of renunciation but rather a pleasurable place of unexpected freedom where the last word is ‘I am’.

Line by line, the Nobel prize-winning author of SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt) unravels the web of unconscious influences and real power relations that simultaneously bind the sexes together and distance them from one another.

Sabine Mitterecker, Wolfgang Musil, Sarah Melis, Christina Scherrer and Alexandra Sommerfeld have set out to survey the topography of Elfriede Jelinek’s text, to set individual strands of her linguistic composition free on the set. In this performance, the presence of the bodies and the images that the language evokes lend the words a fragile existence that goes beyond the text and makes it something we can experience with all our senses.

With SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt) at the F23, the theatre has gone to what was once the city’s periphery and is now a centre of its expansion, thereby tapping into a new audience outside its traditional institutions.