Twenty years ago, when the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature it was a surprise that the award had gone to an author who was barely known outside the German-speaking world. It set off a scandal, too. A juror from the academy that makes the decision resigned, calling Jelinek’s work “unenjoyable, violent pornography.”
Despite her Nobel and the controversy that it engendered, Jelinek is still hardly a household name in the English-speaking world. In Germany and Austria, however, the premiere of a new play by this prolific and divisive writer is always an event. When the Münchner Kammerspiele presented the opening night of Jelinek’s “Ash” on Friday, every seat in the playhouse’s main theater was full.
Outside Europe, Jelinek is known, if at all, for her novels, which include “The Piano Teacher” (adapted into a 2001 movie by Michael Haneke) and “The Children of the Dead,” a gruesome 500-page opus that has just appeared in English, nearly 30 years after its original publication. But in Germany and Austria, she is the most widely performed female playwright writing in German, according to her publisher, having written nearly 50 scripts since 1979.
Like most of her stage works, “Ash” bears little resemblance to a conventional play. Jelinek’s signature dramatic form is the theatrical monologue: lengthy paragraphs of discursive text without clearly indicated characters, stage directions or conventional plot. It is left to directors to determine the size of the cast and to divide up Jelinek’s finely chiseled writing, which is by turns poetic, punning, allusive and philosophical.
Yet sadly, Jelinek’s prose is poorly served by the director Falk Richter in his hopelessly cluttered production of “Ash.” Throughout, our attention is diverted from the text by a barrage of ominous projections, creepy AI-generated video and the distorted sound design.
“Ash” continues the exploration of ecological themes that Jelinek has addressed, often with alarm, in much of her recent work, including her 2013 “stage essay” “rein GOLD,” which brings together Wagner and environmentalism, as well as her plays “Black Water” and “Sun/Air,” with which “Ash” constitutes a loose climate trilogy.
“How many worlds do we assume? How many of them have I already used up?” Jelinek asks in her opening lines. Her short text — 25 pages in total — is shot through with alarm about environmental collapse, but the tone is forlorn rather than outraged. In connecting the putrefying of the earth’s elements with the decay of the human body, the play feels deeply personal for its 77-year-old writer. “The world, with its old friend time, has inflicted wounds on me and taken away beauty,” runs one line.
Yet there is also another source for the play’s overwhelming sense of loss: the sudden death, in 2022, of Jelinek’s husband of nearly 50 years, the actor and composer Gottfried Hüngsberg. “I miss him,” she writes. “I have a red-hot knife in my chest, no one will pull it out because otherwise there would be a hole there that one could look through.”
I wish that Richter, who also directed the acclaimed first production of Jelinek’s Trump-inspired “On the Royal Road,” had found a way to cojoin the individual grief and the collective calamity that emerge as Jelinek’s main themes. Instead, he leaves the show’s six actors stranded on a stage that is, at times, literally full of garbage.
Katharina Bach, brave and deeply affecting in the Kammerspiele’s recent productions of “Amour” and “Nora,” declaims with gusto in a vocally crisp and physically limber performance. Like those of her co-stars Bernardo Arias Porras, Thomas Schmauser and Ulrike Willenbacher, it has many moments of bravura but, in keeping with the production as a whole, lacks definition and focus, largely because it’s hard to discern the logic with which Jelinek’s text has been partitioned among the actors.
Amid all the muck, there are flashes of insight in the staging. Schmauser, particularly gifted as a comic actor, delivers a raspy, cough-filled monologue while dressed as a chain-smoking Planet Earth; the late-evening appearance of two futuristic birds with computer circuits embedded in their plumage (costumes: Andy Besuch) provides the production’s single most memorable visual inspiration. Yet considering how much rich material Richter has to mine — Jelinek’s web of references in “Ash” includes Hesiod’s “Theogony” and Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer” — this world premiere production feels slight.
By all rights, we should be gripped by Jelinek’s apocalyptic vision and moved by her tragic loss. However, moments of genuine engagement are vanishingly rare during this show’s 100 minutes, which feel too long. Simply put, it’s hard for the audience to care. Perhaps this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a shrug.
Ash
Through June 23 at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich; muenchner-kammerspiele.de.
