Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2004, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voces in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power". She has since then continued to expand one of the most prolific and many-faceted oeuvres in contemporary literature by working on a vast variety of issues spanning from the repression of the weak to the fascisms of everyday life in consumerist societies.
Through her very particular writing strategies, she has thus persisted in bringing up the painful subjects of the discourse of modernity. Jelinek is one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary German-speaking theatre and she also has a considerable stage impact internationally. But only this year have Australian audiences been able to witness the first ever production of Jelinek's work in their country.
My staging of three of Jelinek's "Princess Dramas" ("Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty" and "Jackie") at Red Stitch Actors Theatre in Melbourne (June-July 2011) was part of an ongoing wide research project that aims to 'recover' Jelinek for the English-speaking stage by working on theatrical strategies in order to bridge problems of intercultural transfer in the Austrian writer's plays and thereby, to fill an assumed 'gap of translation'. André Bastian.