At the end of "Harald's Farewell" the Narrator tells us that the King "meditates, in his mind, that life in the end is a pretty villainous tale. Goodbye." "Harold's Farewell" (Harald, jäähyväiset, 1976) is the last of twelve plays collected in Paavo Haavikko's Näytelmät (Plays,… 1978). All the tales are pretty villainous in their way, though their ways are various enough; but there are certain recurrent themes, some of them familiar from Haavikko's poetry, some more suited for drama. Critics of Haavikko generally agree on his complexity and ambiguity, the inseparability of the components and concepts of his world. This makes the task of analyzing his works more difficult. In trying to clarify, one is constantly in danger of oversimplifying, of not doing justice to his sophistication, or even of losing him entirely….

[His first play], Münchausen (1960), was an absurdist play written before the theatre...