White As Snow

White is usually associated with innocence, and snow covers up traces - however, not in Elfriede Jelinek’s play. In White As Snow, a sequel to her legendary Sports Play, she focuses her creative energies on recovering the hidden. The play was sparked by the revelations of skier Nicola Werdenigg about sexual abuse of women by Austrian coaches, officials and male skiers. Her disclosures were met with icy silence on the part of professional skiing associations which confirmed that sport is our modern religion, and its gods are omnipotent. Jelinek interweaves these reports of abuse with Oskar Panizza’s scandalous play, Das Liebeskonzil, creating a dark, blasphemous satyr play. White As Snow re-examines ancient and Christian ideals of women and reviews centuries of power abuses in which the roles of victim and perpetrator are often clearly defined and women commonly refused the status of a subject. «Women are seen as second-rate men, because they aren’t men.«As so often in Jelinek’s work, the daily business of politics functions here in the context of a long history of thought systems - until finally blood-red traces of guilt become visible in the snow …