This classic work of post-war fiction was made into a magnificent BBC television series starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

    In The Killer, a three-act drama staged with great success in Paris and London, he creates a study of pure evil. Bérenger, a conscientious citizen, finds himself in a radiantly beautiful city marred only by the presence of a mysterious, irrational killer. Bérenger's determination to find the murderer in the face of official indifference, and his final defeat at the hands of an impersonal, pitiless cruelty are the elements of a parable which speak with the universality found in Kafka's The Trial. The Killer, says Pierre Marcabru in Arts, is "Ionesco's best play...Never has despair had such a tone, at first ironic and ultimately lugubrious. Here good will and hate clash in an implacable encounter where evil triumphs...Ionesco has transcended his own earlier dramatic limits. Beginning with a verbal revolt, he has reached a point of logical revolt."In Improvisation, or The Shepherd's Chameleon, Ionesco plays the part of himself facing three learned scholars who claim to know better than he what he should write and how he should set about it. Inspired by one of Moliere's farces, Improvisation is a wildly hilarious comedy that sets forth the playwright's own ideas of the theater. The last play, Maid to Marry, creates a comic frenzy out of the phony verbiage in a conversation between a man and a woman.