For Ágota Kristóf, theatrical and novel communication are not as clearly different as we would expect given the difference between the two literary genres. The first plays, written in French-speaking Switzerland starting from the end of the 1970s, contain those motifs that would later build the imaginative system of the most famous novels. Violence, latent or manifest, dominates all sentimentality and outlines, in its precise contours of abuse of the body, what will be the constant controversy in all of the writer's activity in the theatre, in the novel, in poetry. In the features of violence we see a detached testimony of social relationships, that accumulation of frustrations that causes individual events to transform into episodes of a broader human story.