ABSTRACT
Utopia has always been severely criticized by conservative thinkers. Ernst Bloch showed both its historical importance and the need for it in his study, The Principle of Hope. It will persist because it liberates the forces of imagination and hope to produce a necessary counter-image to an ever imperfect reality. The form of Wesker's early plays is determined by the dialectics of Utopia and reality. The tension between social criticism and Utopia as well as the contradiction between imperturbable belief in the ideal and the failure to realize it is the mainspring of their dynamics. They dialectically relate the critique of historical social developments to the attempt to escape from historical constraints into a timeless vision. Wesker makes no attempt to sketch the Utopia which would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown. He barely hints at the new ecological vision or the battle for the equality of the sexes.
