Premiere: Kain-Elegie

Sunday 4th July 2004, 18.00 hrs
Hebbel am Ufer
HAU 1
Stresemannstr. 29
10963 Berlin 

Admission: € 10/€ 8

Author: Michael Roes

Director: Agnes Hansch
Assistants: Kathleen Bredenbeck, Elisabeth Schuster
Stage and Costumes: Halina Kratochwil
Assistants: Rosa Eisermann, Norman Heinrich
Music: Sascha Bachmann, Sebastian Singwald

In ‘Kain-Elegie’ Michael Roes examines the moment of the biblical murder, and invests this first homicide with the resonance of all history’s following murders. Roes has worked on this poem for over seventeen years; he has produced the scenic adaptation especially for the poesiefestival berlin.
Seven young male actors trace the primordial murderer Kain and his appetite for the act of killing, his mourning over the fact, his questions, his opposition to society and God in all their contradictions. Kain becomes a single, violent mass of language in the Chorus, or shows alone multiple faces, which are also vulnerable, subtle, unsurely questioning. Kain attempts to struggle free from God and his laws, and pays for it with loneliness, loss of direction, ‘transiently terrestrial’.
A printed version of the adaptation will also appear in time for the premiere.

‘Roes narrates such that one can almost forget to breathe from sheer excitement’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung)