“Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?”

“Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?” The question gives La Bâtie’s production at Geneva’s Théâtre de l’Orangerie its starting point. In a lively electro-punk atmosphere, four activists try to open cracks in the mold that confines them.

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Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?

The quartet behind “Les Mondes qui nous manquent” follows the ideas of Mark Fisher, who described capitalist realism as the sense that capitalism presents itself as the only possible system. The performers also confront what they see as a fascination with an idealized past, one that locks people into a nostalgic loop.

Their challenge is personal as well as political. “Our desire is driven by advertising; we must rediscover our true desire,” they say. Another appeal urges audiences to set their own pace and allow beauty, accuracy and clear-sightedness to emerge.

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Our desire is driven by advertising; we must rediscover our true desire.

The production questions the identities people are expected to perform in everyday life. Being a good colleague, spouse, parent or friend, it argues, does not automatically make someone a good person when everyone remains trapped in a loop that endlessly reproduces a destructive system.

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You must set your own pace, bring beauty, accuracy and clear-sightedness into bloom.

The show belongs to a wider theatrical response to a world in crisis. Like Marion Duval’s “Le Retour” and Giulia Belet’s “Transgresser,” it looks for ways to escape what the production presents as an infernal spiral rather than simply describing the fire around it.

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Being a good colleague, a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend, and so on, does not necessarily make me a good person, because we are all imprisoned in a nostalgic loop that endlessly reproduces a system that destroys us.