Drama and the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre
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own understanding of why postmodernism never became a significant categorical term for drama studies:

Finally, perhaps drama has not been perceived as postmodern for critical purposes because, so closely and early allied to the capitalist system, the structures that dictate self-reflexive drama became mere conventions, themselves to be transcended in order to keep “bums on seats”. No longer carrying weight as reflections of social structures, they became mere techniques, the staples of dramatic irony. An example of this might be the typical early modern aside, conventionally taken for Protestant psychological “interiority” rather than as deliberately self-conscious dramatic technique. (57 in this volume)

Perhaps, moreover, it is because dramatic self-reflexivity has had such a long, varied, and diverse theatrical history (stretching back, in its various guises, at least as far as Shakespeare) that the explicit self-consciousness of Pirandello and Brecht didn’t cry out for a whole new critical paradigm with which to explain it, and instead, we got much more focused critical treatments (the epic theatre, the theatre of the absurd).

Skipping forward some four hundred years from Shakespeare to the twentieth century, we find that the fourth wall of theatre can be just as important thematically in nominally realist texts as it was in Elizabethan times, regardless of the realist tendency to ignore this fourth wall. Indeed, Ibsen himself provides a notable case in point, as a fair amount of criticism has observed postmodern tendencies in his later work, making Ibsen scholarship a notable exception to the lack of dramatic postmodern criticism.1 Eugene McNulty’s essay “Parody, Metatheatre, and the Postmodern Turn” (herein) on the early twentieth century Irish playwrights Bernard MacNamara and Denis Johnston paints a stark picture of how a stifling romantic nationalism, for all its pretensions toward appropriating realist representations of nationalist cultural traditions, is essentially constructivist in nature; moreover, McNulty uncovers a whole tradition of self-conscious Irish drama wherein “the idea that history’s agents could be re-performed through an unmediated process of realist presentation is revealed as a convention in need of revisiting” (71 in this volume).