Friedrich Dürrenmatt was the leading German-language dramatist of the generation after Bertolt Brecht. He dominated German, Austrian, and Swiss repertoires and was familiar to audiences throughout Europe and North and South America. His plays reach everyone; they teem with brilliant ideas and fantastic inventions; and behind the comic-grotesque satire lies a deeply humane, urgently felt philosophical and religious impetus. He wrote not book dramas but plays to be performed. When not directing the plays himself, he regularly participated in their production, revising and rewriting in consultation with actors up to the last moment; if the performance failed to affect the audience as he thought it should, he cast the text in a new version.

His most popular plays, especially Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Lady, 1956; adapted as The Visit, 1958) and Die Physiker (1962; translated as The Physicists, 1963), made him the darling of...