The Play's The Thing

Is it a play within a play or a ploy within a ploy? Two works, written centuries apart, prove thought-provoking.

- Michael Billington

I HAD an odd experience recently. I saw, on successive nights, two entirely different plays that had an unexpected link: Samuel Adamson’s Wife, at London’s Kiln (until July 6), which offers a wry meditation on modern marriage, and Beaumont’s rumbustious Jacobean comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, played in Russian by a crack team from Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre at the Barbican earlier this month. The connection? Both used the device of a play within a play.

In Wife, we had scenes from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; the whole joke of Beaumont’s burlesque depends on a grocer and his wife interrupting a comedy called The London Merchant. This started me thinking about how drama down the ages has made use of the play-within-a-play format.

I guess there are several reasons. It’s a reminder that all theatre is an illusion that can be swiftly punctured. It allows dramatists, as with Michael Frayn in Noises Off, to capture the backstage chaos the audience never sees.

It can also act as a reminder that plays build on the remembered past: the whole point of Wife is that modern couples, whether straight or gay, still wrestle with the problems of personal freedom that Ibsen addressed in A Doll’s House.

At worst, theatre’s preoccupation with itself can seem like narcissism; at best, it can yield a heightened awareness of the idea that all the world’s a stage. Shakespeare, of course, got there first. His fascination with theatre is self-evident and I recommend Anne Righter’s brilliant book Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Penguin).