Raststätte oder sie machens alle
by Elfriede Jelinekby Elfriede Jelinek
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Two provincial housewives arrange to meet two men in animal costumes for anonymous sex in the ladies’ toilets at a motorway service station so that they can unleash their own animal instincts at last. Their husbands find out about it, put on the costumes and instead of having »beastly good sex« the women are left only with the realisation that instead of a bit on the side, they have just had monogamous sex again. With this comedy Elfriede Jelinek wrote a feminist travesty of Mozart’s »Così van tutte«, varying the classic tropes of nature and culture.
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Two housewives from the Austrian provinces who »haven’t even been able to acquire a few ounces of living dangerously« arrange to meet two men in animal costumes for anonymous sex in the ladies’ toilets at a motorway service station to finally »no longer be a reserved nature« but to unleash their desires. Their husbands waiting in the bar find out, put on the animal costumes and try to find the animal inside themselves. Instead of experiencing »beastly good sex« the women are left only with the realisation that instead of a bit on the side, they have just had monogamous sex again. Instead of excess the characters’ pent up sexual energy is discharged as xenophobia: the original partners from the personal ad are denounced as »foreigners«, whom they suspect of beastliness and whom they reject all the more strongly as the »other«. In this way they exorcise strangers of the very nature that they find disturbing in themselves.
In her comedy »Raststätte oder Sie machens alle«, first performed in 1994, the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, for decades one of the most topical contemporary dramatists and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, also created a feminist travesty of Mozart’s »Così fan tutte«, to which its subtitle is a direct reference. Here she develops themes from her 1989 novel »Lust« and in the expanses of language that the characters present she plays on the perpetual human conflict between nature and culture. Jelinek’s language proves to be autonomous, resists embodiment and spells out the sociopolitical dimension of gender relations.
To mark the author’s eightieth birthday, Claudia Bauer, resident director at the Residenztheater, directs a homage to Elfriede Jelinek that is highly musical and rich in slapstick.
