This play focuses on Wittgenstein's personal history, his critique of Freud, and his reflections concerning religion and the mystical.
The play opens with a vivid display of many words associated with mystical experiences, e.g, epiphanies, altered states, spiritual awakening, numinous experience, grace, ecstatic wonder, et al. Wittgenstein appears and speaks to the audience:
"That’s a remarkable list, isn’t it! They’re different one from another. If you have had such an experience, for you it was unique. I had one. I was a young man in Vienna. I was watching a play---like you are now. I suddenly realized that I was, I am, 'absolutely safe'. Yes, absolutely safe…whatever happened to me. Strange, yes. It changed me---it did. I think perhaps half of you have had your own mystical experience, one you revered then and still revere. The other half of you may think such events are a delusion, an hallucination; it’s the theatre of the mind’s joke on you, and science will soon lower the curtain on such imaginings. Well, theatre is the place to explore such a dispute. Shall we? Let’s raise this curtain. It’s 1939, and I am in the Reading Room of the British Museum."
The play concludes with Freud disclosing his plan to commit suicide. For those familiar with the play Freud’s Last Session, an imagined conversation of his with C. S. Lewis, this play is a contrast. Lewis severely chastises Freud. Wittgenstein is accepting and hears Freud’s confession.
