ARCHIVES 2012 / Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns. Eine Wirtschaftskomödie

Written a few months before the subprime contract burst onto the landscape, The Merchant's Contracts appears more than ever today as the premonition of all those that preceded it. Elfriede Jelinek's scathing pen attacks large and small speculators in the financial markets and likewise the language they use. With an implacable lucidity and fierce humour, she tirelessly plays with their supposedly rational discourses to communicate the jargon that is as unreal as it is farcical. Their effects only appear all the more tragic. As she says, Elfriede Jelinek does not write plays as much as “talking texts”, a living language bearing the urgency to speak, which needs bodies and the energy of the stage to be realized. The communicative vitality with which Nicolas Stemann and his partners seize it and address it to us, is as outsized as this lush material. Actors, musicians, technicians, video-makers, playwright, director, all present on the stage, fabricate together, in view and in real time, an exuberant ever-evolving theatre machine, that is as much a reading, a concert, a performance, an ancient chorus, a TV show as a general shareholders meeting. In the literal as well as the figurative sense, the doors of this theatre that resembles a cabaret are wide open to the unpredictable reality that nourishes it and that it transforms in return. If these craftsmen, just like the types of performances and artistic languages, move about in it, cross each other in it, freely proliferate up to the point of spilling off the stage, the spectators themselves are invited to go in and out of the theatre as they like. In this performance, as spectacular as it is, it is first and foremost the present that prevails. The obviousness of being together de facto contrasts with the opacity of a system in which fear, greed and cynicism seem to reign as masters. A satire with salutary irony, all the more corrosive as it is borne by an almost Dionysian vigor. SC

The winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, Elfriede Jelinek was born in 1946 in Austria. Slated by her mother for a career as a musician, she finally turned to literature and wrote novels, the most famous and the most autobiographical of which, The Pianist, was made into a film in 2001 by Michael Haneke. But Elfriede Jelinek is also the author of many plays and scripts, all marked by a strong political engagement. Her corrosive lush writing, studded with quotations and at first glance inappropriate for the stage, challenges the theatre to renew itself. Constantly going back to her writings, drawing from the vast manna of the Internet, she produces a flow of words from various sources, as in The Merchant's Contracts, a text that she has been continuously working on since 2008, following the evolution of the economic crisis. “Do whatever you want!” is Elfriede Jelinek's order to the directors who take hold of her texts, such as Karin Beier, Johan Simons and Nicolas Stemann. MS