Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage

The theatre work of the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek is known for its critique of mythology. In her recent “work in progress”, which closely follows media reports about the Iraq war and the tortures in Abu Ghraib, Jelinek concentrates on the mythologizing effects of a “wartainment” that a supposedly alert, educated population can witness as little more than a spectacular television melodrama. According to Jelinek this rapidly erases the event from public memory. In the second step of her progressing work, “Babel” (2005), she deconstructs these telematic strategies of forgetting, ignoring and blinding traumatic experiences by creating what she in a slightly ironical way calls an “artwork of morality”. Jelinek is pleading with her work for a concept of performing history (on stage) that inscribes what does not let inscribe itself: the contingency of events of terror, war and torture that ruptures continuity and signification.