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’Dying is wonderful! You should try it too!’

 Wolfgang Schwitter, a writer and Nobel Prize winner, reached literary immortality already during his lifetime. If you were to believe the official obituaries that appeared after the artist’s death, that is. Remarkably, Wolfgang himself appears after his own death, alive and well, and unexpectedly rings the doorbell of his old studio. What went wrong? Has he risen from the dead? Is it a miracle, a mistake, or a fraud? Soon enough, the resurrection of the revered laureate becomes a nuisance to everyone, and Wolfgang himself in particular. Indeed, he keeps dying and coming back to life. The apparently deceased man finds himself in many a grotesque situation, where Wolfgang’s distant acquaintances and close relatives reappear, the hospital surgeon wants to operate on him once more just in case, his young wife begs him to return home, a priest wishes to pray with the miracle man, and his self-seeking son resolutely claims his inheritance. Wolfgang faces the unfolding events with his peculiar cynical humour, yet his personality changes with each awakening. There are ever more corpses of others, ever more funeral wreaths to his name, and the only thing Wolfgang Schwitter wants is to eventually find a place in the crazy world where he could rest in peace for good.

In his comedy, written already in 1966, Friedrich Dürrenmatt illustrates with absurd exaggeration and irony the pompous world of art, the transience of fame, and the futile human toiling in the face of eternity.