Has the avant-garde of drama in the Western world today reached a dead end? And where will the next development lead to? While it is clearly futile to try to predict the future, some speculation about likely trends might well help to put the present into perspective and, at the same time, clear our minds of some prevailing misconceptions.

Above all, where does today's vanguard stand? It has more than just one spearhead. In the Anglo-Saxon countries and in France one wing of the avant-garde represents a trend that goes back to the early nineteen thirties and Brecht's Epic Theatre, which could only make its full impact felt after the downfall of Hitler (whose accession to power thirty years ago put an end to any creative experiment in Germany). The other main wing of today's avant-garde has equally remote origins. The Theatre of the Absurd is the culmination of a movement which, in surrealist painting or in the writings of Kafka and Joyce, reaches back into the nineteen twenties.