SOURCE: Wolf, Gregory H. Review of Ein Sportstück, by Elfriede Jelinek. World Literature Today 72, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 823-24.

In the following review, Wolf praises the lack of plot-driven action in Ein Sportstück, contending that the long passages of dialogue and monologue “allow Jelinek to diagnose and criticize directly society's ills.”

Ein Sportstück, the latest drama from the controversial Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, is a brutally graphic condemnation of contemporary society's obsession with sports, the athletes who compete, the narcissistic attitude bred by athletics, and the language used to describe competition and victory. Stretching the bounds of dramatic form, Jelinek creates a work with very little action; she even admitted in a recent interview that there is none (Der Spiegel, 6 February 1998). Instead, she relies on long dialogic passages, and employs her command of language to portray a society in which the desire for competition, the indiscriminate use...