Staging Elfriede Jelinek in Australia

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The study at hand discusses comprehensively a range of poetical, ethical and political questions involved in the staging of Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Dramas [Prinzessinnendramen] as the Austrian Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s first work on the Australian stage. Introducing the ‘poetic of an arriving artist’ as a productive approach to staging Jelinek’s plays internationally, the author of this study, and director of the production, consequently scrutinises this poetic’s grounding in a poststructural reconception of the ‘palimpsest’ as a dramaturgical figure of thought. He points to the danger of unintentionally causing disempowering effects through emancipatory strategies of empowerment and eventually comes up with a series of timely proposals for effective and responsible artistic activity in 21st century immigration societies of an ever-globalising world. Engaging with Jelinek’s mythoclastic work serves thus as a highly relevant springboard for giving new impulses to current debates on artistic freedom, political correctness, diasporic art production and Australian discourses of indigeneity.