This emphasis on action and situation leads to a series of highly prescriptive rules, as we see in the criteria that Sartre used in his critical reviews of contemporary theatre writing and production. To rise to the task of achieving a “theatre of situations,” writing and production must resist the temptation of focusing on the characters; they need to present archetypical situations in which human freedom is most radically at stake, notably through different types of universal ‘conflicts of rig