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Perhaps there is no better statement of what is happening in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century drama than that it is “acknowledg[ing] itself as a construct” even while “the effort to repair” is concrete. Indeed, when presented with enough examples, we begin to see an even larger contemporary trend that exists outside of and beyond the way in which each of these plays is about the dilemma of appropriating a progressive politics in the face of postmodern ideological pessimism (i.e., that they are each excessively self-conscious about the limits of postmodernity). About its dilemmas, paradoxes, and dead ends.
It is worth noting, moreover, that even while late-twentieth-century theatre never decisively appropriates—nor rejects—the postmodern, the continually shifting perspectives of contemporary theatre might themselves be seen as part and parcel of a postmodern climate, as, ultimately, we are left with the numerous and conflicting small narratives. To borrow from Lyotard, then, it would appear that the grand narrative gestures of modernism have indeed been replaced by the more localized gestures of the postmodern, meaning that in the final analysis these plays by Ravenhill, Penhall, and Lynn tip postmodern or at least try to. In either case, it is worth noting all the same that this balancing at the tipping point—this desire to have it both ways—is perhaps itself a definitive feature of late postmodern drama. Indeed, we should not be surprised that the continual tipping between a postmodern perspective and an antipostmodern becomes ubiquitous at this point given that, as Wade explains it, “these playwrights and thinkers were responding to the same historical moment, to a contemporary world in continuous revision, with no recourse to metaphysical, rationalist, or political assurances” (287 in this volume).