"I describe human beings," Friedrich Dürrenmatt writes, "not marionettes; an action and not an allegory. I have presented a world, not pointed a moral." In this composite dramatic world of complex ironic situations, the authentic man of genuinely heroic stature, ultimately, is the self-conscious fool who is so dominated by fortune that even his tragic nobility becomes a source of somersaulting absurdity. Dürrenmatt's is a formless world, anonymous and abstract, but is personalized concretely in individual protagonists, so that the plays avoid the abstract irony of Pirandello or Sartre, for instance, or the deliberate alienation of Brecht. The characteristic perspective for Dürrenmatt's world is distance, a vantage point from which to recognize personal form and social chaos. This distance, the characteristic of comedy, reflects, as Dürrenmatt acknowledges, an attitude toward the universe beyond the stage, as well….

Adopting a surreal landscape from the Expressionism...