supposedly looking for someone in the apartment next door strikes up a flirtation with Agnès and becomes, in effect, her live-in lover as Pierre spends more and more time trying to make sense of her brother’s papers. In time, Agnès elopes with the man, known only asle premier venu (“the first one who comes along”). By the time she returns, ostensibly to borrow Pierre’s typewriter, order has been restored both inside and outside the apartment; Pierre is nearing the end of his task, with all Jean’s writings arranged in neat stacks. Before he can be told of Agnès’s return, however, Pierre is found dead in his downstairs study by Tradel, to whom he has confided his decision to abandon what remains of the project.

Clearly, the dead man’s papers represent for Pierre both an occupation and a search for meaning—despite ironic suggestions scattered throughout the play that there may well be less to Jean’s literary legacy than meets the eye. It is Pierre’s preoccupation with his lifework that costs him the affection of his wife, although, as Esslin observed, Agnès herself appears to stand for disorder: It is, after all, through her that Pierre has become involved with her brother and his papers; when she leaves with le premier venu, order returns to Pierre’s life and work in direct proportion to the disorder that begins to plague the life of her new lover. Yet as soon as Pierre questions and begins to renounce his long-term project, he dies, having apparently failed both in his work and in his interpersonal relationships. Implicitly, L’Invasion casts serious doubt on the validity of work, as well as that of love and friendship. Such, Adamov seems to be saying, is the eventual result of all human endeavor: futility.

Like L’Invasion—the title presumably refers to the intrusion of each person’s life into the life and pursuits of others—all Adamov’s best plays graphically illustrate the isolation and alienation that he sees as defining human life, both individual and social. His main characters, usually sketched rather than fully drawn (yet still more rounded than, for example, those of Ionesco), are seemingly adrift in a sea of humanity, desperately seeking some meaning that would give confirmation to their identity.

Professor Taranne

Professor Taranne, perhaps Adamov’s best-known play, was said by the author to have come to him in a dream, requiring only transcription and a few minor changes in the main character. To an even greater degree than L’Invasion, Professor Taranne describes in unforgettable imagery the isolation of each individual, even with regard to himself.

The action of Professor Taranne begins when the title character, a distinguished-looking man of about forty, is accused of indecent exposure on a public beach. Incensed, the professor points with pride to his reputation as an internationally famous scholar, claiming with righteous indignation that no man in his position would be capable of such a deed. Turning for help to a number of familiar faces, he is met only with blank stares as each person, in turn, denies ever having seen him before. One woman, at last, appears to recognize Taranne, only to reveal that she has mistaken him for his arch rival, Professor Menard. With each successive denial, the accused appears to dig himself in deeper, casting serious doubt on his very identity as well as on his innocence. As the action proceeds, even his existence is called into question. At one point, Taranne’s sister arrives with a letter from the university in Belgium where Taranne claims that he has been invited to lecture. Sure at last that his identity is about to be proven to the satisfaction of local authorities, Taranne rips open the envelope and pulls out a letter rescinding the earlier invitation. Taranne, it seems, has been exposed as an academic fraud, guilty of plagiarizing the work of the eminent Professor Menard. Before long, having utterly failed to furnish evidence of his identity to satisfy even himself, the professor slowly begins to take off his clothes, performing the same offense of which he stands accused in the first place.

As Esslin observes, “It is by no means clear whether the play is meant to show a fraud unmasked, or an innocent man confronted by a monstrous conspiracy of circumstances engineered to destroy his claims.” Such ambiguity, presumably preserved intact from Adamov’s original dream, endows Professor Taranne with a rare evocative and associative power, casting serious doubt on even the most elementary assumptions of human identity or worth. Here especially, the neurosis that is said to have inspired Adamov’s best work becomes almost contagious, inviting the spectator to share fully in the nightmare haunting Taranne and his creator.

Tous contre tous

Considered by George Wellwarth to be the finest of Adamov’s plays, Tous contre tous combines much of the ambiguity of Professor Taranne with the sense of disorder that underlies the action of L’Invasion. Although it predates by several years the “committed” phase of Adamov’s dramatic career, Tous contre tous functions on at least one level as an ingenious social and political satire. In later years, Adamov would repudiate the play for not coming to grips with the problem of racial and religious persecution by naming actual names and places. Like much of Ionesco’s best work, however, Tous contre tous derives no small measure of power from the implication that the action described could happen anywhere, at any time, in any society. In the opinion of most of Adamov’s critics, Tous contre tous remains his most effective expression of social criticism, considerably stronger than the deliberately didactic efforts of his later period.

Like L’Invasion, Tous contre tous takes place in a country overrun by refugees, many of whom are identifiable by a pronounced limp. The audience is warned, however, that not all refugees limp; conversely, not all those who limp are necessarily refugees. The main character is one Jean Rist, who becomes an antirefugee rabble-rouser for intensely personal, nonpolitical reasons: His wife has eloped with a refugee. Riding the wave of political fortune, Jean ascends briefly to power as a result of his views; before long, however, a shift in public opinion grants power to the refugees, and it is Jean who faces persecution; perhaps not surprisingly, he then affects a limp and masquerades as a refugee in order to escape detection. Presumably, a subsequent shift in political fortunes will enable him to break cover and profit from his earlier reputation. In the meantime, however, Jean has fallen in love with a refugee girl, Noémi, with whom he lives in relatively happy obscurity. When another revolution occurs, Jean chooses to die with Noémi rather than to save his life by disclosing his true identity, a gesture that would also cost him Noémi’s trust and affection.

The ending of Tous contre tous, criticized by some observers as a peculiar, sentimental lapse into the conventions of such subgenres as the romantic war film, may also be seen as the gesture of a man who, having at last perceived the cyclical nature of history, has simply grown tired of playing “the game.” Sentimental or not, Jean’s liaison with Noémi is at the very least to be seen as a value more permanent than the variable fortunes of politics.

On balance, the refusal of the pre-Brechtian Adamov to anchor Tous contre tous in place and time seems to have been a wise, if unconscious, decision. Although obviously inspired by the persecution of Jews and other minorities before and during World War II, Tous contre tous remains suggestively afloat, still applicable to the fickleness of human behavior—both individual and social—some thirty years after it was written.

Ping-Pong

The last of Adamov’s plays to be written before his well-publicized commitment to the Brechtian mode, Ping-Pong is regarded by a majority of his critics as his finest achievement. The genesis of Ping-Pong appears to have been atypical. Adamov said that he wrote the last scene first, having simply envisioned two decrepit old men playing a seemingly endless game of table tennis. Indeed, even in final versions of the play, the concluding scene is discontinuous with what has gone before, although in a way quite fitting.

The action of Ping-Pong begins with two young men—Victor, a medical student, and Arthur, an art student—whiling away their precious idle hours over the pinball machines in Mme. Duranty’s café. Before long, the pinball machine comes to dominate their conversation, their thinking, and eventually their lives. Applying their intellectual curiosity to the machine both as a game and as an artifact, they begin to devise better marketing procedures as well as better-engineered machines and are soon taken into the employ of the consortium that owns and distributes the machines. Abandoning their studies, they devote their lives to their work for the consortium, which in turn defines and circumscribes their behavior. When they quarrel, it is either about the design of the machine, its marketing, or a girl who works for the consortium and appears to distribute her favors equally between them. History and politics, meanwhile, are of interest to them only insofar as they affect the use, distribution, or development of bigger and better pinball machines.

In the final scene, Arthur and Victor are presumably retired, discarded by the consortium to which they have obsessively devoted the best years of their lives. They are playing Ping-Pong, arguing over the rules of the game just as, years earlier, they argued over the flippers and flashing lights of the pinball machine. Discarding net and paddles, they are volleying the tiny ball with their bare hands when Victor falls dead of an apparent heart attack, leaving Arthur utterly alone.

Like L’Invasion, Ping-Pong questions humankind’s relationship to work, especially insofar as work relates to an innate quest or need for meaning. As Esslin observes, “Le Ping-pong is a powerful image of the alienation of modern man through the worship of a false objective, the deification of a machine, an ambition, or an ideology.” By allowing the pinball machine to invade every dimension of their lives, Arthur and Victor are quite graphically and convincingly dehumanized, exchanging passionately technical dialogue as if its subject were a matter of life and death. Of all Adamov’s plays, Ping-Pong is the most effective, and the most deserving of survival.

Paolo Paoli

Conceived in a spirit of fidelity to Marxist ideals as fulfilled by the Brechtian epic theater, Paolo Paoli nevertheless incorporates many elements characteristic of Adamov’s earlier “poetic,” nonrepresentational mode. In retrospect, this first of Adamov’s “later” plays is probably also the best, although it falls far short of the standard set by Ping-Pong or Professor Taranne. Unfortunately, Adamov’s personal concept of ideological drama appears to have entailed a nearly absolute suppression of originality; to the extent that Paolo Paoli succeeds, it does so because Adamov’s wild originality had yet to be thoroughly tamed.

Purporting to describe in detail the political and socioeconomic causes of World War I, Paolo Paoli is an epic drama in twelve scenes covering the period from 1900 to 1914. The title character is a dealer in rare butterflies; his friend and customer, Florent Hulot-Vasseur, is a prosperous purveyor of ostrich feathers, indispensable to the fashions of the period. The author of L’Invasion and Ping-Pong is thus very much still in evidence, choosing such bizarre commodities as his examples of international trade. Adamov is careful, however, to document his choices, showing that ostrich feathers constituted France’s fourth largest export in 1900 and relating Paolo’s butterfly trade to the exploitation of prisoners on Devil’s Island, where Paolo’s Corsican father was employed for years as a civil servant.

Unlike many epic dramas, Paolo Paoli is notable for its economy of distribution. Thanks, no doubt, to his apprenticeship in absurdist drama, Adamov managed somehow to compress his historical parable into the lives of only seven characters. A priest, a union leader, and Paolo’s German wife (on occasion, Florent’s mistress) suffice to close the interlocking circles of exploitation, privilege, and economic interest. Unfortunately, the brilliance of the play’s conception is frequently vitiated by trite and long-winded speeches that detract from the otherwise well-managed action. Once the initial novelty has passed, moreover, it is difficult to sustain interest in such characters as Paolo and Florent, regardless of their occupations. “The idea is excellent,” acknowledges George Wellwarth, “but the actual story of Paolo Paoli is simply dull. In turning from the general to the specific, Adamov has paradoxically lost the knack of telling a story in dramatic terms.”

Later Plays

Indeed, whatever remained of Adamov’s creative vitality had disappeared completely by the time of Le Printemps ’71, a drab, utterly humorless reconstruction of the Paris commune, or La Politique des restes, an intentionally doctrinaire Marxist account of racism in the United States between the two world wars. Perhaps the greatest loss sustained by Adamov in his shift to Brechtian realism was that of his ironic distance. Unlike Brecht, he was never able to reconcile subjective observation with the sought ideal of objectivity.