Drama and the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre By ...

one necessarily obscures attention to the other, until that attention shifts, and you get the reverse. Thus, while Murphy argues that “the vividness of the stage is too intense to be made unequivocally ‘fictional,’ ” (354 in this volume) I argue, rather, that it is when this vividness makes itself evident (for whatever reason) that drama tips away from metanarrative display and moves beyond the postmodern, and moreover, that when this vividness is obscured, it tips back again. From one perspective, the stage is composed of ontologically stable objects; but from another, as Peter Handke explains, the objects of theatre “are deprived of their normal function in reality” such that “a table can serve as an ornament, as a door, as scenery,” (17) in turn raising the distinct possibility that a theatrical production might appropriate props as one more means to self-consciously comment on the artificiality of theatrical production. Handke attempts this in his own play, Offending the Audience: “ They have an artificial function in the game I force them to play. They are like the objects a circus clown makes factually unreal” (57).