ASCHE

Elfriede Jelinek has written a new play. Jelinek’s latest work Asche (ashes) is a deeply personal text about the loss of a beloved companion, the fear of loneliness, the decay of one’s own body and, at the same time, the fear of the impending end of human civilization. Jelinek takes another look at the great myths of creation: what is the world, how did it come into being, why is the human body so susceptible to failure and why were we humans such unbearable “evil guests” on this planet who will soon have to leave – if humans continue to devastate all the foundations of life. But where to?

Because the gods no longer want us and “people were not obedient to the earth, but only to their leaders”, Jelinek allows herself a tragicomic thought experiment: Why not create an unconsumable parallel earth? A never-aging, never-ill whole with a perfect body? That would be practical. It would also have been better to make the sea out of plastic right away, that would have saved us a lot. Now we have had to throw a lot of plastic into it to come to this conclusion. This touching text oscillates between sarcastic thought loops and bitter realization. And what do we get in the end? “But all singing is over now. And in the evening, when we go to sleep, what do we do? We do not sing, we do not bloom. Think about our suffering. Nothing else”.