Common to many of [Arrabal's] plays is a naïve, childish dialogue that reveals cruelty and tenderness as twin aspects of each character. (p. 29)

Arrabal's works contain the high color, flamboyant sensuality, erotic cruelty, and grotesque humor of the countrymen he admires—Calderón, Goya, Valle-Inclán, and Lorca…. Arrabal has written anti-war satires—Picnic on the Battlefield, Guernica. More of his plays focus on couples as he explores the horrors of the love relationship, in an idiom quite different from that of Strindberg—Orison, Fando and Lys, Bicycle of the Condemned, The Coronation, The Great Ceremony. Child-couples with invented nicknames exist in their private worlds, into which others occasionally intrude. Devoid of conventional morality, whose clichés they may voice mechanically, the couples resort to games and rituals. Like the paranoid victims of Adamov's early plays, the not-so-innocent children of Arrabal are crushed, whatever they do.

Though...