A play set in East Berlin in June 1953, during the workers' uprising. A famous theatre director, clearly modelled on Bertolt Brecht, is rehearsing his own version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus when a crowd of workers asks for his support. He treats their request as material for his art and hesitates. The play asks what writers and artists owe to political action and whether theatre can stand apart from real life. It is a thoughtful, controversial drama about intellectual responsibility.