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Metatheatre
The term is used to refer to aspects in a play that informs the audience that the actors are actually acting in the play. It emphasizes the fact that the actors are not in their real world. It is meant to lead the audience to the circumstances of the performanceCITATION Beh16 \p 229 \l 1033 (Behura 229). Some of the key aspects that are employed in a play to show the metatheatre include a direct address of the audience, an expression that the actors are aware of acting, acknowledgement of the existence of the audience, a differential expression in meaning of the play in terms of the time and place of the drama, plays within plays, eavesdropping or cases where one actor is acting or copying the role of the other. In the modern times it’s often referred to “meta-acting” CITATION Kes11 \l 1033 (Keshavarz).
The term metatheatre was first introduced in the year 1963 by Lionel Abel in his book Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form CITATION Pér11 \p 13 \l 1033 (Pérez-Simón 13). Abel defined metatheatre as the most modern term that modern playwriths use to treat a subject gravely. He argued that the late plays of the Greek times used to describe pain while giving it pleasure. However, due to modernity these forms of writing which were very common in the Shakespeare’s and Calderon’s plays were replaced by metatheatre. As Perez-Simon (13) notes, the plays were “serious plays which were self-reflexive: the illusion that sustains the play’s world also sustains the world outside the plays - the so-called ‘real world’.”
In the early theatrical plays, metatheatre was employed in a manner in which the actors were commenting about other actors actions sarcastically or critically while the other talked about pretend not to be hearing what the other actor is sayingCITATION Ras14 \p 12 \l 1033 (Dawood 12). The common concepts that were used to describe this type of drama were the locus and palatea which means location and place. The locus in this sense was used to localize the drama where the actors are acting as if the audience does not exist while in platea a neutral ground is arrived through which the audience and the spectators connect through removing the boundaries between the two. In essence, this blurs the line between reality and actingCITATION Hor86 \p 16 \l 1033 (Hornby 16).
In the modern era metatheatricity was established through the “fourth wall” concept. The fourth wall is described as an illusion wall that separates the actors from the auditorium in indoor scenes. In this case, the actors act as if the audience cannot see what they are doingCITATION Col98 \p 211 \l 1033 (Collens 211). However, as the concept of realism and naturalism took center stage of the theatre world many playwrights have focused on employing metatheatricity through breaking the fourth wall. This can be experienced in instances that the a...