[Gombrowicz' plays Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and The Marriage] are compelling satires of society….

The two plays deal with two different societies. In Ivona, Princess of Burgundia it is pre-World War II European society (the play was written in 1935) or, more precisely, the ruling classes of that society. The Marriage (1946) is about the new society which resulted from the war and from the seizure of power by the communist parties, with emphasis on the events leading up to that seizure. But Gombrowicz goes beyond the localized framework which he attacks and which inspires him to describe an essence which, if not universal (something difficult to imagine in a social satire), is at least much more general. Ivona, Princess of Burgundia describes the dominant strata of any more or less bourgeois society; The Marriage, the essential schema of a revolutionary seizure of power by the masses and its consequent...