The play "Krigdan" by Eugène Ionesco, in my opinion, should be studied considering the time it was written. It was composed in 1959, approximately 20 years after the eruption of massive mass movements that devastated Europe with war and simultaneously with the peak of communist movements in distant parts of the world. The story, in my view, didn't have much appeal, and for this reason, I deducted one star. However, it is a clean story, and within the core of the plot lies a more important and difficult question that, in my opinion, holds all the value of the play: "If one day all people turn into Krigdans (you can read it as conforming or becoming a supporter of a completely new value system), what is the obligation?" In the position of speaking, it might be easy to answer that a human should preserve his "authenticity." But Eugène Ionesco is fair enough to show that in the whole city, there was only one window cleaner who chose this path. The truth is that reason selects the way of interacting with the environment. Reason desires to survive and live, and for this reason, it becomes compatible with its environment. If it didn't, humanity would have perished many times before. But it is this very reason that often becomes a slave to humans, and indeed, it is this reason that in the eruption of mass movements, each person from different segments of society adheres to a group that, in a normal state, might have completely rejected its values. In fact, all of Eugène Ionesco's art in this play is to show this problem of how different individuals with different ways of thinking ultimately, for different reasons, adhere to the group of Krigdans or the movement of "Krigdanism." Although I still believe that this has not been done with the required appeal and is truly lacking in this regard! Nevertheless, I definitely recommend it, and in my opinion, it is worth reading and thinking about. However, one point also comes to my mind, and that is that, in my opinion, for today's reader who lives in the modern world, reading this book may also have risks. You see, the response of 20th-century humans to the events of that century was to officially recognize the differences between humans and different ways of thinking and to fight against the homogenization of society to avoid the recurrence of mass movements. While what most threatens modern humans is the excessive desire for "difference" and, even worse, the demand for the official recognition of these differences. Someone who reads the play "Krigdan" today will probably feel a sense of confidence from ridiculing and criticizing uniformity with the group, unaware that the pain of 20th-century humans was something else, and the pain of today's humans is something else. The discussion is, of course, very extensive in this regard, but in my opinion, it is better to stop here for now. P.S: Some friends paid attention to the philosophical aspects and allusions of the book, which I didn't notice.
P.S 2: I listened to the audio play with the direction of Radnoush Moghaddam. The truth is that the quality of its execution didn't please me much.