Finally [in Théâtre] all of Nathalie Sarraute's plays—even the most recent—are available in one volume…. Together they form a dramatized version of some of the ideas set forth in the author's prose fiction. There is, for instance, the uneasiness of a group of people in the presence of a young man who remains entirely silent. Another gathering is disturbed by a young woman's obvious lie about her past. The third play deals with a character's habit of pronouncing the suffix -isma instead of -isme. What is beautiful comes to be seen as being simply what is "normally" accepted.

As in Nathalie Sarraute's prose fiction, a dissenting voice says that reality is a network of habitual patterns of group behavior in which the "I" confronts "them" in a thousand guises, to triumph for a moment or to be swallowed by the opaque communal pool...