Four plays on the difficulty of man's retaining his individuality in modern society.

Hunger and Thirst is one of Eugène Ionesco's late plays, premiering in Paris at Comédie-Française on February 28, 1966. The play has one act divided into four periods. In the play, Ionesco depicts religion as an expression of conformism and of the alienation of idealism to the establishment.

The picture: Le Gros Monsieur, aka the fat gentleman, is an irresistible, shrewd businessman. Le Peintre, aka The Painter, wants to sell him his painting. Initially, he wants 500,000 francs for it but in the end, the fat gentleman so savagely criticizes the painting, when he finally looks at it, that the Le Peintre agrees to pay the fat gentleman to store his painting. Alice, an old, ugly, and ill woman, is asked by her brother to lend him a hand. After the painter leaves, the brother-sister relationship is reversed and the meek creature becomes authoritarian and demanding, threatening her brother with her walking-stick. The fat gentleman obeys her but, when she is not looking, he grabs a gun and shoots. A miracle happens: Alice transforms into a beautiful maid. The old and ugly neighbor comes in, and she becomes beautiful too. The painter then comes back and turns into Prince Charming. The fat gentleman is the only one who remains fat and ugly, so he asks the audience to shoot him.

Anger: The playlet takes place on an idyllic Sunday in an idyllic country town, where strollers shower coins and smiles on the local beggar, and husbands treat their wives with adoring deference. Eventually, in all the town's houses and apartments, everyone sits down to Sunday lunch. One after another, the husbands discover flies in their soup. Smiles turn to frowns, soothing words to cross ones. Insults are delivered and returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon. The final scene, projected on television, is of the planet exploding -- because of a fly in the soup. Ionesco's black joke scarcely exaggerates the monstrous disproportion, the near pathology, of latter-day anger.

Salutations (French: Les Salutations) is a sketch written by Eugène Ionesco in 1950. Three men, after being asked "How are you?" greet each other continuously through different adverbs and each responding to the civilities of the previous questioner.

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