Plays-within-plays in three modern plays: Michael Frayn's Noises Off, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval

Abstract

One of the techniques that authors have frequently favoured in the history of drama is the use of a play-within-a-play. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Buckingham's The Rehearsal, Sheridan's The Critic, Pinero 's Tre lawny of the Wells', and more recently Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound and The Real Thing, Iloward Brenton's The Churchill Play, Michael P'rayn's Noises Off, Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, David Hare's A Map of the World, and Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval -just to mention the most famous oneshave relied for part of their theatrical effect on the creation of an imaginary world inside a ncticious one, so they can juggle with the concepts reality and iIlusion, and interweave the different layers of fiction and metafiction. One might wonder about the reason why this oid' feature is still favoured by the most popular and successful of our contemporary playwrights. The answer may be rooted in the inherent qualities of this device. When an author inserts a play within another one, he is at once changing the general approach to his work of art. Some of his characters become ' actors' in the play embedded in the central piece, while others now take the role of the audience, thus becoming one with us. A ciose relationship is established between stage and public, and the footlights seem to disappear while we watch the new play together.' Notwithstanding the importance of this communion, this is not the sole motive that prompts the author to use this technique. A play within-a-play helps the playwright to reinforce, broaden and deepen the central motif in his main play; it becomes a very valid means to make his audience think about the fictionality of real life and the reality of fiction; and, if its form is that of the mock-rehearsal the playwright is furnished with the formula that will enable him to point out the flaws and enhance the virtues of the theatre, and to comment largely on the state of the theatre of his time. To illustrate the enormous possibilities of this practice, we have chosen three plays by three contemporary playwrights: Michael Frayn's Noises Off (1982),