Premiere: 16.01.2015
Final show: 04.05.2017 (Currently no tickets available)
After three years on the front, the locksmith Gleb Chumalov comes back to his home town in 1920 as a revolutionary hero assumed dead. But instead of returning to a socialist society under construction, he encounters hunger, fear and resignation. Both the doubt of the workers and the rust of the machines are eating away at the cement plant. Gleb's wife Dasha, now a party official, is desperately fighting the hunger and depression of the revolution-weary population. She has simply no time for the returnee. After the war, Gleb Chumalov must face the hardest of all tests: the work of a hero on a world that no longer needs heroes like him.
Heiner Müller's Zement (Cement) was created in 1972 in the GDR. In the leaden times of the militarization of the leftist movement (West) and the concreting of circumstances (East) Müller unearths Fyodor Gladkov's 1925 revolutionnovel of the same title and connects it to antiquity. His text explodes not only ideological certainties, but also the shape of the narrative. This makes Zement into a grand tragedy about resistance against futility.
