Saʿdallah Wannous, a Syrian playwright (1941–1997), is one of the most significant writers from the Arab world in the twentieth century. His first major play, An Evening's Entertainment for the Fifth of June (1968), is a critique of the duplicity of Arab officials during the June 1967 War. A Marxist and Arab nationalist, his principal early theatrical influence was Bertold Brecht. Other plays from this period include The King's Elephant (1969) and The Adventure of the Head of Mamlouk Jabir (1969). After suffering a breakdown in 1977, he wrote no plays until The Rape (1990), an adaptation of an Antonio Buero Vallejo play. In 1992, he was diagnosed with cancer and, from then until his death in 1997, he wrote over half a dozen plays in a variety of styles including Historical Miniatures, Rituals of Signs and Transformations, and Drunken Days. Like Václav Havel and Wole Soyinka, he not only wrote a half-dozen of the most vital plays in the canon of twentieth-century world theater, he was also an important political thinker.