The main character is Andrzej Mejer, a young psychiatrist who decides to conduct a controversial experiment. Wanting to get deeper into the psyche of his patients, he decides to become one himself. Only two people know about his experiment, his professor, Walas, and Zimiński, the head of the hospital where he wants to undergo the 'treatment'. He wants to be treated as an ordinary patient. Being well acquainted with the symptoms of various mental illnesses, he perfectly simulates them. However, his crazy plan has not foreseen some... less than favourable circumstances. First of all, he does not always manage to avoid taking his medication (especially when a dumb but muscular nurse is watching over him), and secondly, the patients, sensing that he is not one of them, treat him with hostility and sometimes aggression. It soon turns out that from the medical point of view, the experiment is pointless, it does not provide any cognitive revelations. Mejer loses control over the situation and becomes hysterical, which ends up with him being administered stronger drugs and strapped to the bed. To make matters worse, leaving the hospital turns out not to be that easy, after all Mejer has been classified as a patient with symptoms of a serious mental illness. Meanwhile, the protagonist stumbles upon a suspicious case. His companion in the room turns out to be his colleague, Kryński, who claims that the hospital is a psychiatric facility for inconvenient doctors. He believes that he was sent to hospital by his envious colleagues because he was close to a great discovery in psychiatry. When asked about this, Zimiński tells Mejer that Kryński's experiments have cost the lives of several patients. Mejer loses his footing; he doesn't know which version is true. Kryński, still in the ward, tries to treat the patients, shares his notes with Mejer, and also gets him LSD as a pass to the world of madmen. Meanwhile, things get complicated as the trusted orderly, Zimiński, suddenly dies of a heart attack and Walas leaves for the States for three months. Now Mejer is in a real trap. No one wants to believe his story, he is officially rendered incapacitated by his wife; to make matters worse, LSD turns out to be a real pass – Mejer loses control not only over the situation, but also over himself.
The author superbly turns up the tension and the story unfolds in multiple subplots, surprising the reader/viewer with twists and turns in places which seemed to proceed the way we’d expect them to. Together with the protagonist we enter this intense, scary and funny world, the hospital imagery is delicious, excellent, as are full-blooded portraits of individual patients. The atmosphere of fear, horror and isolation is ever-growing.
At the same time, questions arise about the limits of experimentation, about knowledge which can be dangerous and bring irreversible consequences. And finally, the most important one – what distinguishes a madman from a sane one, whether there is such a thing as normality at all.
The adaptation has been written by the author on a grand scale, with several locations and a large cast, thus offering many different staging possibilities.
Wojciech Smarzowski produced an excellent performance based on the book for the Television Theatre. The production won the Grand Prix at the "Dwa Teatry" festival in Sopot and the "Prezentacje" festival in Katowice in 2002. The novel also served as inspiration for a feature film produced by the Hollywood Sunrise Studio in Canada, for which the screenplay was written by the author.