POSTMODERN LAMPOON: METATHEATRICAL SATIRE ON NEOLIBERALISM IN TIMBERLAKE WERTENBAKER’S OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD

Metatheatre, which generally indicates a number of strategies revealing the fictionality 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 up to day. In English theatre, a remarkable number of studies on this concept have focused on the Renaissance as it was popularised in this period. The 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 show that metatheatre has also been employed as a tool of satirizing politics by the playwrights. In both the Renaissance and the 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 where 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 in order to show that satire still has validity in the postmodern age, and draw attention to the symbiotic and persistent relation between satire and metatheatre.