The opposition of modern technique—or perhaps, more precisely, of modern technique's laziness—to the conception of art during classical periods is explosively evident if we compare Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise with Calderón's play as presented by Charles Dullin at the Théâtre de l'atelier. To say that the modern play is primarily psychological is ah inadequate formulation of the differences in genre. There is a deeply searching psychology in The Surgeon of his Own Honor, but where all the modern dramatist's virtuosity is used in interweaving ideas, and where the modern play's complexity tends increasingly to stay on the intellectual plane, its action so reduced as to be little more than linear, in the classical period—at least in the plays of the Elizabethan and Spanish theatres and in Corneille's early work—it is the action itself which is the object of the dramatist's entire concern.