Mandel"s plays, whether tragic or comic, or lying in a bittersweet world between belong neither to the naturalist nor the absurdist school, perhaps as a result of this dual background. The plays are too poetic - too patrician, one is tempted to say - to fall into the genre of kitchenette agony or pathetic psychology, and they are too sane, too lucid, too classical, to be affiliated with the a-logical theatre. A trinity of Sanity, Philosophy and Elegance presides over these original plays, even when they are most sombre, even when they ask - and cannot answer - ultimate problems.