Fourth Wall - Outside Theatre

Outside Theatre

The metaphor of the fourth wall has been used by the actor Sir Ian McKellen with regard to the work of the painter L. S. Lowry:

Lowry... stood across the road from his subjects and observed. Often enough there are a number of individuals in a crowd peering back at him. They invite us momentarily into their world, like characters on a stage sometimes do, breaking the fourth-wall illusion...

McKellen justifies this application of the theatre term to Lowry's art by explaining that "Lowry’s mid-air viewpoint is like a view from the dress circle", looking down as if to a stage. And, McKellen argues, Lowry "often marks the limits of the street scene with curbstones or a pavement that feel like the edge of the stage where the footlights illuminate the action."

The metaphor of the fourth wall has been applied by literary critic David Barnett to Harvard Lampoon's parody of The Lord of the Rings when a character breaks the conventions of storytelling by referring to the text itself. The character Frito observes "it was going to be a long epic", which in Barnett's view "breaks the 'fourth wall'".