Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century Plays

Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century Plays ELINOR FUCHS Metatheatre is an old practice but a comparatively recent critical interest. It attained momentum among critics in the early I 960s, stirred partly by Lionel Abel's brief essays in Meta/heatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Abel claimed that a new dramatic "fcnn" had arisen in the English renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age. "[TJragedy would be replaced by metatheatre" (112) in the theatres of Shakespeare and Calderon, Abel argued, after whom extended a lineage that stretched to Pirandello, Genet, Brecht, and Beckeu. These plays had not been recognized as a distinct form, Abel said, and had no name: " I shall presume to designate them. I call them metaplays, works of metatheatre" (61). Though the study of Shakespeare's metadrama, along with its upper-caste cousin, the dream play. has had a robust critical career, beginning even before Abel's large claim and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s, there has been little continuing effort to work out a general theory of metatheatrical dramatic fann or to trace its development over time as a unified field.' An exception is Richard Hornby's essay "Varieties of the Metadramatic "; Homby's primary interest here. however, is less critical than taxonomic. What explains this gap in criticism? Perhaps the modernist insight that all art is self-referential was thought to need no additional elaboration in the case of theatre. Perhaps the variety and ubiquity of metatheatrical motifs, appearing in, or with, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, pastoral, and farce, has defeated inquiry. Perhaps the cult of Pirandello earlier in the century resulted in a corresponding pendulum swing. But at bouom, I suspect that further study has been blocked by a too literal devotion to Aristotelian categories of plot and character. The present article seeks to reopen the question of metatheatre, or the theatricalist play, as I prefer to call it.' For this discussion, I focus my interest on dramatic texts that are structurally theatricalist - that is, those that are conModern Drama, 44:3 (2001) 337 ELINOR FUCHS structed around incommensurate ontological "worlds" ("real" and theatricalized , or "real" and dream-like) and in which this incommensurability may be seen through many different dramatic elements (I use Aristotle's term intentionally ) of the dramatic structure, such as figure, action, language, mood, tone, and landscape. 1lay aside for this discussion the legion of examples that clutters discussions of theatricalism, in which various theatrical ruses of character or incident (such as disguises, lies, tricks, or staged events) are organized by some figures at the expense of others, but in which the ontological base of the action is not in question. The structurally theatricalist text can be fruitfully read not only from an Aristotelian but from a Platonic perspective. Plato's understanding of truth and "the Good" as given through a hierarchy of ontological levels is not a substitute for Aristotle's powerful analytic of reversal and recognition, but it offers an interpretative model for the theatricalist play's parallel and sometimes multiple narrative registers. Under the sign of Plato, the "soul" of the theatricalist dramatic work would be neither plot, as Aristotle argues, nor character, as Hegel claims in his Romantic revision of classic theory, but the relationship between or among ontological levels.3 Given his settled anti-theatricalism, Plato's parable of the Cave in The Republic, Book VII, might seem an ironic source for the theatricalist play, yet it provides a concise and clarifying model. Staged in three scenes, its central drama consists of an ascending progress of landscapes that exchanges shadows cast upon the wall of a cave for the brilliance of the sun shining directly from the heavens. The progression is not simply scenic but spiritual and moral, for the same upward movement signifies the exchange of artifice for nature, mere appearance for truth, and error for the Good. While Plato is enough of a dramatist to offer a protagonist (the reluctant cave dweller released from his chains and forced to venture into the light) and a plot improved by a poignant, indeed almost tragic, conclusion (the traveler's return to the cave amidst the mockery and threats of its long...