The Dance of Death and the Triumph of Death are themes that appeared across late medieval and Renaissance Europe in the visual arts, poetry and drama. Death snatching people away became a favourite subject of didacticism. In Germany, France and Switzerland, particularly, the lasting impressions made by extant murals, verses and plays have continued into our time…. In modern drama, there are two distinct manifestations of the influence of the Dance of Death: first, the imitative Dance of Death plays …; and second, the more original adaptations of the theme such as … Dürrenmatt's The Meteor…. (p. 107)

In Dürrenmatt we find a playwright wholly obsessed with death. It is a peculiar aspect of his dramatic art that he places death in a grotesquely comic universe…. The Meteor represents "grotesque theatre," a type of play based on the philosophical proposition that man's fate is grotesque but logical and therefore...