  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 rights.’ Theatre needs to avoid psychology and concentrate on action (in clear contrast to Marcel’s theatre, which is mainly concerned with staging conflicts of inner conscience); it must be wary of a realistic approach that might take the focus away from the violence of the conflicts. For the same reason, the duration of the play and the number of the characters must be reduced. The stage must be empty and the language must be direct but non-realistic, compressing the acuteness of the situation as powerfully as possible. In short, existentialist theatre explicitly intends to return to a Greek conception, attempting to present contemporary “myths” in a world without gods (Sartre 1976).