Translator into Estonian JAAN KUUSIK
Set designer LIISI EELMAA
On the stage RIINA MAIDRE, TAAVI EELMAA, JUHAN ULFSAK, ERKI LAUR, ANNE PALUVER, TERJE PENNIE, EVA PÜSSA
Von Krahl's production of "Nora", directed by Rainer Sarnet, is Estonian audience's first encounter with internationally acclaimed playwright Elfriede Jelinek.
Elfriede Jelinek (1946) is Austrian novelist and playwright; her plays have recently enjoyed growing popularity throughout Europe. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Jelinek could not attend the award ceremony because of her fear for crowded places.
She graduated Viennese Conservatory of Music with an organist diploma and studied art history and theatre arts in University of Vienna. Jelinek was a member of Austria's Communist Party from 1974 to 1991 and became known as outspoken feminist. Prevalent topics in her prose and dramatic works are female sexuality, its abuse and the battle of the sexes in general. In 2001 Michael Haneke made a prize-winning film version of Jelinek's novel "The Piano Teacher", starring Isabelle Huppert.
Jelinek's "Nora" begins where Ibsen's "Nora" ended. Nora leaves her cosy doll house to start a new life as factory worker. Jelinek presents a critical view of social stereotypes and challenges strategies of fear. Jelinek combines sexual and economic vocabulary. Therefore she, as Freud earlier, has been accused of sexualizing the whole world. This is a way to ridicule and neutralise authors who aim to analyse systems of power. It is not a question of 300-year-old concept of capitalism but of 6000 years of authoritarian civilization of patriarchal traditions that have distorted human instincts. Constant stress and depressions are signs that human being cannot manage to accept the father figure in him/herself and society that reproduces itself through power, money, and fear.
Protagonist Nora submits to the man of power who himself is subjected to fear.