Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It

The play opens in a poor flat at nine in the morning. Amédée Buccinioni, a forty-five-year-old writer, sits at his table trying to write a play, but in fifteen years he has found only two lines: «It won't be without help!» and «It won't happen by itself». His wife Madeleine works at a telephone switchboard and keeps the house and the meals going. Every conversation turns in the same circle: Madeleine says «I am a slave», Amédée says «inspiration won't come», and neither hears the other. The doors must always stay shut, because there is something in the room on the left.

In the left room a dead man has lain for fifteen years — the reader is not told who he is. He keeps growing: long white beard, huge nails, still young, green eyes like lighthouses; mushrooms grow on the walls and have now appeared in the dining room. Amédée looks for excuses to «look at him», Madeleine keeps trying to stop him. The couple show each other no affection; shared guilt binds them: they ask «has he forgiven us?» and then answer themselves — if he had, he would not keep growing.

The comedy is built from the telephone and daily detail. At the switchboard Madeleine speaks to the President, the King of Lebanon and the firemen, always saying «putting you through»; meanwhile Amédée tries to find the end of the sentence «The Old Man to the Old Woman…». Shopping is grotesque too: Amédée lowers a basket on a string from the window and orders plums, butter and yoghurt from a seller in the street, while Madeleine simultaneously dictates regulations over the phone («wagons over ten tons…»).

The turning point of Act One: footsteps on the stairs, the postman arrives. The couple are terrified as if about to be arrested; the letter is addressed to «Amédée Buccinioni» and they try to prove it is meant for another. After the postman leaves there is a crack and the sound of breaking glass from the left room: the dead man's head pokes out of the window, the couple push it back in and fold it double; thinking the neighbours heard, they shout «the postman did it!» and the echo repeats. Then huge feet come out through the door.

• Dialogue is built from repetitions, interruptions and fast replies: the couple repeat the same complaints without hearing each other
• The advance of the dead man's feet and the spread of the mushrooms serve as visible fear on stage
• The stage directions are very detailed: clock hands, light and movement carry half the meaning of the play
• Telephone bells speed up the comedy and make Madeleine's exhaustion visible