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In other words, late-twentieth-century theatre might yet be postmodern (i.e., as a cultural phenomenon) despite itself.
A Different Perspective
The importance to this collection of Neil Murphy’s essay on Beckett resides in the fact that it argues against one of the central conceits of this collection, arguing instead that while there are perhaps fundamental morphological differences between theatre and other postmodern genres, those features are as likely to provide epistemological and ontological grounding to a performance as they are to lead to epistemological and ontological disruptions:
However, even while situating itself in opposition to the idea that the very morphological features of the theatre are fundamental to how and why theatre became postmodern, Murphy’s essay fits the overall arc of the collection all the same. For while I might argue that it is because the fourth wall is so visible (through ostension, even) that theatre became so quickly and self-consciously metatheatrical as early as Pirandello, Murphy’s point isn’t so much oppositional to mine, as the reverse side of the same coin. For while I argue that the “reality” of the fourth wall is hard to ignore, and Murphy argues that the “reality” of physical objects and characters onstage are equally hard to ignore, the thesis of the collection more generally is that the tipping from one perspective to another is something akin to a gestalt shift and that while both attitudes toward the artificial/real dichotomy are always and already available, attention to