Serious Money Becomes "Business by Other Means": Caryl Churchill's Metatheatrical Subject

Abstract

I. Metatheatrical Trends In his foundational work devoted to defining the difference between tragedy and metatheater, Lionel Abel identifies numerous distinguishing characteristics of metatheater. Numbered among them is the claim that metatheatre, order is something continually by men. (1) Even this singular tenet, which for the sake of brevity I will call the Order can be regarded as fairly comprehensive, especially if it is read as suggesting that metatheater endeavors to point out ontologically that the physical world might not be quite what it seems. Moreover, distinguished participants in the form such as Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht are defended by Abel as metatheatrical, at least according to his theory. (2) When Pirandello explores dramatically our inability to distinguish between illusion and it can be seen as metatheatrical (according to the Ontological Order Tenet) because even as metadrama blurs the boundaries between illusion and reality, it so by circumscribing a theatrical order explicitly improvised by men; Brecht is metatheatrical, in Abel's scheme of things, because insists on the fact that [his characters] are puppets; he does not try to pass them off as real people, and [he] in exhibiting their mechanisms. In keeping with the Ontological Order Tenet this reminds us that the point of Brecht's plays is to focus on the very fact that they have indeed been improvised by men. It is also worth noting that there is something distinctive about how Brecht commits to this Ontological Order Tenet when compared with Pirandello's handling of the matter. If we revise the Ontological Order Tenet so that it reads For metatheater, the order is something by men;' for instance, we may understand it as a Order Tenet,' an idea far more central to Brecht's work than it would be to Pirandello's. Brecht's work is different from Pirandello's in that it makes use of metadramatic concepts not only in the ontological sense to reveal that the world might not be quite what it seems, but in its rendering evident the ideological, constructed nature of society, which implies that under the right set of circumstances it too could be different (even better) than it is. While not typically described as metadramatic, Caryl Churchill's work has time and again been linked to Brecht's, particularly in her use of various alienation techniques. Like Brecht, she delights in exhibiting [her characters'] mechanisms in order to disrupt the audience's comfort level and to inspire critical thinking about the play's subject matter. If we are to follow Abel's salient definition of metatheater's characteristics, then a case has already been made in the literature that Churchill is indeed metatheatrical. Her most acclaimed play, Cloud 9, (3) in fact, serves as an apt example of the way in which the playwright fulfills the Social Order Tenet in an explicitly Brechtian way, such as when she asks that each character in the play be cast in such a way as to draw attention to stereotypical attitudes about race and gender. (4) It is very clear that at least some of Churchill's work is directed toward critiquing the fact that the social order is something by men. Churchill not, however, invoke the Ontological Order Tenet merely in order to investigate the way in which order in both the real world and the theatrical world are similarly constructed (as Pirandello did), nor she simply use the Social Order Tenet to characterize theatrical productions themselves as something completely by men (as Brecht did). This essay investigates a metadramatic technique distinctively Churchill's--the way in which she explicitly recognizes how the two sides of the fourth wall, that conceptual barrier between audience and stage, actually interact with one another. Moreover, because the means of theatrical production were much different in Brecht's era than they are today, particularly with the advent of multinational corporations and instantaneous forms of communication, this study begins to reveal Churchill's metadramatic modus operandi; that is, the improvisations of the theatrical community can be recognized in Churchill's work as constructions specifically designed to serve the interests of status quo multinational capitalism (for example, by propping up only those artificially constructed versions of reality that sustain it). …

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