Directing Elfriede Jelinek's Theater Texts: Co-authorial Complicity and Ethical Entanglements in Jossi Wieler's Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) and Nicolas Stemann's Die Schutzbefohlenen

This article explores the productive challenges that Jelinek's theater texts pose for her directors and the ways in which directorial decisions stage the very dilemmas that her writing engenders for readers. The playful linguistic overflow in Jelinek's recent theater texts ensnares directors in the very ethical questions and discourses of power that they address. To illustrate this argument, the article analyzes two very different directorial approaches with case studies of Jossi Wieler's 2008 staging of Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) and Nicolas Stemann's 2014 staging of Die Schutzbefohlenen . Wieler, I argue, renders Jelinek's provocative writing style on the stage but neutralizes her assault on the reader or viewer by offering a clear moral high ground and a locus of identification in the play, whereas Stemann's combination of moral intervention and ironic metatheatricality into the text ensnare him and his ensemble in the play's critique of xenophobia and racism.