The Madman and the Nun

is set entirely in a “cell for raving maniacs” in a lunatic asylum, where we meet the madman of the title, the poet Alexander Walpurg, who has been confined here with acute dementia praecox. We are part of a scientific experiment lead by Dr. Grun and his Freudian preconception of curing the patient with the help of Sister Anna. The author flamboyantly turns everything and everybody into the confusion between the sanity and madness. The play is a strikingly funny attack on both medicine and academia and man's futile attempt to control the "demons" of existence. Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was a Polish playwright, novelist, painter, photographer and philosopher.