Postmodern Lampoon: Metatheatrical Satire On Neoliberalism In Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good
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Date
2024
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Ankara Üniversitesi
Abstract
Metatheatre, which generally indicates a number of strategies revealing the ctionality of
plays, has been prevalent throughout the history of theatre. The metatheatrical vehicles
like the play-within-the-play have been sustainedly employed by playwrights in Ancient
Greek theatre, Roman theatre and English theatre since the Renaissance. In English
theatre, many studies on this concept have focused on the Renaissance as it became
popular in this period. Studies on metatheatre have often described it as a technical
novelty breaking the illusion created by traditional/realist plays. However, a careful
analysis of its use in plays from varying periods and cultures shows that metatheatre has
also been employed as a tool of satirizing politics by the playwrights. In both Renaissance
and eighteenth-century English drama, metatheatrical tools were used to satirize
domestic politics and familiar politicians. However, with postmodernism, in the twentieth
century, the context of satire changed since it was directed at universal problems,
ideologies and accustomed ways of thinking rather than the contemporary problems of a
certain country. In line with such a change, metatheatrical satires in the twentieth century
aimed to target grand narratives produced by modernity. One such play is Our Country's
Good (1988) by Timberlake Wertenbaker in which neoliberalism as a master narrative is
satirized through the device of the rehearsal-within-the-play. Within this context, this
study aims to explore Our Country's Good as a postmodern satire to show that satire still
has validity in the postmodern age and draw attention to the symbiotic and persistent
relation between satire and metatheatre.
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Keywords
Metatiyatro, Hiciv, Postmodernizm, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good