| When Lionel Abel declared in 1963 that a new form had succeeded tragedy as the dominant force of modern theatre, a form that he called "metatheatre," he gave focus to a longstanding critical and theatrical interest in theatrical self-consciousness. As the work of Pirandello and Brecht prompted critics to follow Abel's lead in analyzing reflexive drama, practitioners of theatre marked this introspective turn by attempting to strip the theatrical event to its foundations. At the core of this challenge is the question of how power is distributed among the participants in the theatrical event itself.;This project attempts to understand the modern interest in metatheatrical forms as a fictional expression of the anxieties of the central theatrical figures of the spectator, the actor, and the playwright. The struggles among these figures within the fictional world of the play engage many of the ontological concerns identified with metatheatre more generally, blurring the boundaries between the staged and the real and toying with conventions of identification between the audience and the fictional characters. Metatheatrical representations of these three figures stage battles and negotiations over the essence of the theatrical experience and the divisions of power between the multiple creators and interpreters of the "text.";By examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays from a number of different national traditions (including works by Tom Stoppard, Peter Weiss, Griselda Gambaro, Luigi Pirandello, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Kennedy and Sarah Kane), I unfold the anxieties peculiar to each of these three corners of the theatrical triangle: the writer's discomfort with the interpretive embodiment of the text, the actor's unease with the rigidity of the script and the judgmental gaze of the spectator, and the audience's claustrophobic relationship to its own passivity and potential absorption into the world of the spectacle. This argument culminates in a discussion of the metatheatricality of dramatic representations of the therapeutic relationship in contemporary British and Irish drama, with its emphasis on the self-presentation or even acting of narratives of illness and health and the ambiguously judgmental gaze of the therapist. |
