SOURCE: "Lovers, Labours, and Cliff Top Meals: The Architectonics of Dürrenmatt's two Herkules Dramas," in Seminar, Vol. XX, No. 4, November, 1984, pp. 279-89.

In the following review, Wolfe compares the love scenes in the 1954 radio drama to the 1963 stage version of Dürrenmatt's Herkules. She contends that the love scenes were awkward in the radio drama, but are a more important subplot in the stage play.

No other radio play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt has elicited such criticism, no other theater piece such impassioned denials as Herkules und der Stall des Augias. Deeply offended by the lampoon of their heroic tradition, and resentful of what appeared as a dark attack on the democratic process itself, Swiss audiences and reviewers alike rejected the two Hercules dramas. This was the emotional, public reaction to Dürrenmatt's playful handling of hallowed institutions; scholarly attention, however, turned inward, to a structural irregularity...