To my mind there is a strong element of spurious arrogance, of pretentiousness and slickness in everything Peter Weiss has written for and thought about the theatre. His psychological alienation seems to have strengthened his artistic self-confidence. He is nothing if not original, seemingly unconcerned about traditional forms and genres and yet cleverly drawing from the treasure house of European literary traditions. The main fascination of his writing lies in its masterly ability to fuse and blur distinctions and oppositions. In the prose works this manifested itself as a fusion of acutely objective descriptions of events and emotional states with an abundance of private fantasies; in the plays as a curious blend of primitive and sophisticated formal elements which resulted in a dramatic collage rather than in an organically developed dramatic form. The only external unity of the collage is an acknowledged debt to Dante (who, after Hesse...