An artist in doubt, an exploratory artist, an artist experiencing a personal and creative crisis. An artist stuck for years in a totalitarian system which has branded him, trying to protect himself through inner immigration.

One day some friends come round asking him to set himself on fire. Though initially he wants to refuse, the idea slowly grows on him: his last day of life could become his final work, and his public suicide is the only gesture that could possibly oppose the system.

Tadeusz Konwicki’s “A Minor Apocalypse” was created in a period when communism was in decline. It was a caricature, a show of resistance, a moral examination of the consciences of his generation, and ammunition against the system; over time, it also became a colorful document of a seemingly bygone epoch. Yet is the spectre of totalitarianism gone for good?

In today’s world, where, on the one hand, the threat of Russian imperialism has come back to haunt us, and on the other political surveillance has become the domain of a technocracy that invades every field of our lives, “A Minor Apocalypse” fascinates us as a dystopia that is not so unreal. After the self-sacrifices of Ryszard Siwiec in 1968 and Piotr Szczęsny in 2017, who rose to become symbols, could a similar gesture make sense in 2030, 2060, or 2100?

Etymologically speaking, an apocalypse is an “unveiling”—a point when the truth comes sharply into focus, reaching us as it never had before. We set off alongside the play’s main protagonist into a terrifying and delirious dream of a future we should not allow to happen, but which is forever returning in our nightmares as a potential reality.