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"Spectacular Resistance": Metatheatre in Post-Colonial DramaI JOANNE TOMPKINS From its earliest history, theatre has incorporated references to its own theatricality . This self-referentiality, which has been co-opted by other genres, is a particularly important aspect of modem and postmodem novels that often rely on dramatic tenninoiogy to explain themselves. Metafictional moments are, according to Patricia Waugh, author of Meta/iction: The Practice ofSelf-Conscious Fiction, there for the sake of "play.,,2 But drama's self-conscious moments often have much more agency and purpose than Waugh's concept of "play" implies. Hamlet's mousetrap, after all, is intended "to catch the conscience of the king." Richard Hornby's conclusion to Drama, Metadrama and Perception is that metadrama is "estranging,"3 presumably for the audience, but this definition is also too simplistic for post-colonial plays where metatheatre 's signifieds communicate much more than estrangement. This paper considers metatheatre and plays-within-plays4 in Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona's The Island, Louis Nowra's The Golden Age, Wole Soyinka 's Death and the King's Horseman, Derek Walcott's Pantomime, Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, and Renee's Jeannie Once to offer possible ways to re-read metatheatrical moments as locations of deliberate dis-location of colonial power. If metatheatre "re-uses" or "re-cycles" theatre, then in the post-colonial context it should be possible to see metatheatre as a strategy of resistance. While theatre generally replays the present or the past to celebrate it, remember it, or decipher it, metatheatre in post-colonial plays is often a selfconscious method of re-negotiating, re-working - not just re-playing - the past and the present. There are at least three types of post-colonial metatheatre : counter-discursive metatheatre, allegorical metatheatre, and mimicking metatheatre.5 Counter-discourse in metalheatre, to borrow from Helen Tiffin's discussion in relation to the post-colonial novel,6 re-writes (or re-presents) a "classical" Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 42 Metatheatre in Post-Colonial Drama 43 text (or part thereof). Fugard, Kani and Ntshona's The Islan'" employs a wellknown counter-discursive text, Sophocles' Antigone. Following Anouilh's use of Antigone to perform resistance in Nazi-occupied France, Fugard describes two Robben Island prisoners - John and Winston - preparing a version of Antigone for a prison concen. The play seems to defend state justice: Antigone admits to breaking the law and to deserving punishment, so it is unlikely that Hodoshe, the guard, would object and censor the play. The originary play binds the two prisoners together even more than their chains do, both in the relating of the play and the preparation for its production. Antigone set in Robben Island doubles the wrongs suffered by the original characters: the best the two prisoners can hope for is to be released from a maximum security prison into apartheid South Africa. More imponant, cross-dressing complicates attempts to resist apartheid and wrongful imprisonment when it becomes one way in which the prisoners create a subversive means of communicating. of working against the government , and of funhering the cause of freedom even while being physically incarcerated. The most significant words of the inset play, Antigone's final insistence on upholding hOllour, are spoken not by Winston in his Antigone wig, but by Winston, wig in hand: Winston tears off his wig to deliver the final lines. He is, then, playing himselfall well as Antigone, as well as himself playing Antigone. Winston and the audience are familiarized with the AntigOlle story throughout the play, since John describes in great detail the version he saw. In this context, it is possible to see Antigone having a familiarizing function in The Island rather than the defamiliarizing function that Errol Durbach hall allcribed to it.S As well, the audience is given the opponunity to become accustomed to the sight of Winston dressed as a woman and to laugh at his costume in a "non-performance" context. The distancing effect of the inset play will work only on Hodoshe, who will misread in the cross-dressed Antigone the success of his attempts to break his prisoners. Hodoshe sees only the end product, not how...

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