Metatheatre, and the closely related term metadrama, describes the aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre, or to the circumstances of its performance.
Metatheatrical devices may include: direct address to the audience (especially in soliloquies, asides, prologues, and epilogues); expression of an awareness of the presence of the audience (whether they are addressed directly or not); an acknowledgement of the fact that the people performing are actors (and not actually the characters they are playing); an element whose meaning depends on the difference between the represented time and place of the drama (the fictional world) and the time and place of its theatrical presentation (the reality of the theatre event); plays-within-plays (or masques, spectacles, or other forms of performance within the drama); references to acting, theatre, dramatic writing, spectatorship, and the frequently employed metaphor according to which "all the world's a stage" (Theatrum mundi); scenes involving eavesdropping or other situations in which one or several characters observe another or others, such that the former relate to the behaviour of the latter as if it were a staged performance for their benefit.
[example needed] In early modern English theatre, characters often adopt a downstage position in close contact with the audience and comment on the actions of others sarcastically or critically, while the other actors assume the convention that the first remains unheard and unseen while so doing.
Following the work of Robert Weimann and others, theatre studies uses the terms locus and platea (relating to "location" and "place", borrowed from medieval theatre) to describe this performance effect—the locus is localised within the drama such that its characters are absorbed in its fiction and unaware of the presence of the audience; while the platea is a neutral space in close contact with the spectators that exists on the boundary between the fiction and the audience's reality.
While the actor is not necessarily engaged at this point in the direct address of the audience, the reality of the male performer beneath the female character is openly, and comically, acknowledged (qualifying in important ways, supported further in the scene and the play as a whole, the tragic act of her imminent suicide).
It can be created regardless of the presence of any actual walls in the set, or the physical arrangement of the theatre building or performance space, or the actors' distance from or proximity to the audience.
A similar effect of metareference is achieved when the performance convention of avoiding direct contact with the camera, generally used by actors in a television drama or film, is temporarily suspended.
Instances of metatheatricality other than "breaking the fourth wall" occur in plays by many of the realist playwrights, including Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov.
As with modernism more generally, metareference in the form of metatheatricality comes to play a far more central and significant role in the modernist theatre, particularly in the work of Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Luigi Pirandello, Thornton Wilder, Samuel Beckett, and many others.
In more recent times, With the People from the Bridge by Dimitris Lyacos employs metatheatrical techniques whereby a makeshift play centered on the vampire legend is viewed from the angle of a spectator who records in his diary the setting and preparations as well as the sequence of the actors' soliloquies interspersed with personal notes on the development of the performance.