SOURCE: "Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Story 'Das Sterben der Pythia': Farewell to Theatre and a Return to Fiction and Essays?", in World Literature Today, Vol. 55, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, pp. 614-18.

In the following essay, Spycher examines Dürrenmatt's use of chance and coincidence, specifically in "Das Sterben der Pythia," in place of fate.

For decades after World War II the two Swiss writers Max Frisch (b. 1911;…) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (b. 1921) were regarded as two leading playwrights of the German-language theater. But after his play Biografie (1967) Frisch did not write another for some ten years. This new play, Triptychon, was published in book form in 1978. Will there be a next one? It is an open question. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, has kept writing for the theatre at a fairly steady pace. His last success, however, was Play Strindberg (1969). His subsequent "comedies" have all been failures with the public...