Gitta Honegger:Well, let’s start at the very beginning. What propelled you to write this play?

Elfriede Jelinek: The thought that I’ve got to do something about [Donald Trump]. And I had to work fast. I can’t do it otherwise, it is an inner restlessness. I can’t just wait and then fiddle around with it – I write [one text] several times, this is already the tenth version, that is, I keep writing over the previous one, like [the Austrian painter] Arnulf Rainer, who paints black over everything. I write over everything until I have the feeling, that’s it. And now as new men keep entering the scene, I worked in a few more things I didn’t know before. The first version was so quick, it wasn’t known yet what people he would pick, that’s why this version got to be much longer.

Why?

This thought that he did want to become president as an athletic competition, but did not want to be it, because it’s a lot of work and he is extremely lazy, too lazy to think and generally lazy and that he would shy away from such work, but I was wrong.

But it’s still too soon to tell whether you were right or not.

I think that he wanted to become it, but he did not want to be president. Maybe [Jared] Kushner and his daughter convinced him, they’d like to get into act…well, for me it was quite logical and conclusive, the brief text I wrote and now I think that I wasn’t right at all and this play is, of course, a further attempt, an association to it, as I take the great Oedipus, who preoccupied so many, be it psychoanalysis, be it Greek drama, that is, a superhumanly great figure, that is: guiltless, the guiltlessly guilty one in Western cultures, that I take this great figure, so to speak, who Freud has written about and René Girard and practically everyone has something to say about, that I am taking him down to such a pathetic wretch as Trump, who really is a disgraceful person, dumb, unenlightened, and actually, in the Freudian sense I would call him an Id that never developed an Ego, it’s really an Id that speaks out of him, who has no Superego at all […].

When you start writing, is it meant to be an intervention or are you doing it to think through a particular issue for yourself?

It is both. I clarify things for myself and I also associate them with my own biography, and on the other hand, I have the sense to possibly stir up someone, but that’s ludicrous, for who will come to the theater? It is preaching to the choir. That’s always a big problem, political theater cannot overcome and this is why aesthetically I want to bring it up to a level where it is right.

And how can this be done aesthetically?

By applying the utmost I am capable of linguistically, well, this is my method, which works with the sound of words to over-the-top punning, that is, with language itself, so I use everything I’ve got and go as far as I can go linguistically, and if that is right the political is too. It would no longer work, if I had a political objective and did this with the aesthetics of educational broadcasting or agitprop, though agitprop, taking theater out into the streets could be relevant again.