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What is especially notable here is that in addition to making use of the morphological features of the stage in order to self-consciously reflect on the constructed nature of theatre, Requena also finds that Stein has made use of the morphological features of the script (i.e., the “openings, endings, the division of acts and scenes” (a metatheatrical self-consciousness that wouldn’t arrive in fiction until at least the late 60s).
Samuel Beckett, perhaps, has been critiqued more thoroughly from a postmodern perspective than any other playwright, most notably for how in a succession of plays beginning with Waiting for Godot, Beckett went out of his way to disrupt grand narrative attitudes about truth and language. And yet in response to this standard take on Beckett, Matthew Paproth shows how easily even Beckett’s work tips from postmodern to modern because of Beckett’s commitment to ensuring that his plays were performed to his specifications:
As Paproth explains it, this tendency in Beckett became ever more intense as his career progressed, so that even “as his plays became increasingly concerned with the impossibility of stable or controllable representation, Beckett himself became increasingly concerned with controlling the public reception of them” (135–136 in this volume).
Regressive Modernities
After having become postmodern so early, there is some evidence that drama moved beyond engagement with postmodern perspectives at the same time that fiction and film were just beginning to engage them (perhaps even for the very reasons mentioned by Murphy). Indeed, this