Elfriede Jelinek: Ash

"Even that air would have lasted longer if made of plastic, had we not grown accustomed to our own stupid breathing."

Ash by Elfriede Jelinek as a funeral procession through a vanished world.

A severed bond, a change of state, a loud silence. Finding one's way in a space that has transformed, yet we cannot see it. Someone has gone forever, but the world and my body persist weakly and ever more poorly. How much longer? And God - does he laugh at this?

Elfriede Jelinek wrote the text Ash in 2024 as a response to the death of her life partner, composer and computer scientist Gottfried Hünsberg, who died in September 2022. The text is presented as part of the trilogy Sun/Air/Ash. The language and focus depart from the usual sharpness with which Jelinek has spent decades describing a declining world - instead, she chooses an elegiac tone in which the desire resonates to retell, so close to the horizon of life, the origin of the world as captured by ancient Greek poets and philosophers, and to add her own commentary from the "plastic age," when our own waste will probably outlive us.

Memory of human physical beauty and the physical beauty of Earth mingles in a bittersweet confession with unease about operating machines, with sorrow for a vanished language of two kindred souls, but also with the assurance that some paths, some ways of wandering, still endure even on an overheated planet.

When I have my sad day, I go to my little room, open the door and fall into nothingness, because death is not something you can set. Neither is life.

The first Czech production of the text, translated by Jitka Jílková, is directed by German director Katharina Schmitt at MeetFactory. She offers a theatrical journey as a funeral procession through images of Ash and through the corners of the Smíchov factory. Together with composer Christoph Wirth, set designer Pavel Svoboda and costume designer Tereza Kopecká, she guides the audience into the underworld of a music club, into corridors of escaped beings, and in front of MeetFactory, to places where catastrophe occurred. Performed by Ivana Uhlířová, Pasi Mäkelä, Kateřina Měchurová and Jáchym Sůra.

Note: the production takes place in various parts of MeetFactory.