Vmt premiere

Gerhart Hauptmann

THE RATS

Translated from German by Teodoras Četrauskas

Tragicomedy in two parts

Duration – 3 hours 10 minutes (with an intermission)

Premiere – May 14, 2025

Director – Augustas Gornatkevičius

Dramaturg – Sigita Ivaškaitė

Set Designer – Sigita Šimkūnaitė

Costume Designer – Simona Davlidovičiūtė

Composer – Jūra Elena Šedytė

Lighting Designer – Julius Kuršys

Assistant Director – Diana Gancevskaitė

Cast:

MRS. JETTE JOHN – Indrė Patkauskaitė

PAUL JOHN – Daumantas Ciunis

PAULINE PIPERKARKA – Greta Bendžė

BRUNO MECHELKE – Saulius Ambrozaitis

HARRO HASSENREUTER – Mantas Bendžius

WALBURGA – Ilona Kvietkutė

ERICH SPITTA – Tomas Stirna

ALICE RÜTERBUSCH – Agnė Šataitė

KÄFERSTEIN – Arvydas Dapšys

MRS. SIDONIE KNOBE, ZELMA – Gintarė Latvėnaitė

KWAKWARA – Vilma Raubaitė

At the State Small Theatre of Vilnius, the play is being created by the young generation director Augustas Gornatkevičius, whose artistic style the audience has already come to love and appreciate. This time, having gathered a team of recognized and talented actors from different theatrical schools, the director presents one of the most frequently staged plays by Nobel Prize laureate Gerhart Hauptmann, "The Rats," which the artist created just before his famous recognition. The prominent German writer Hauptmann, while creating vivid psychological characters, sensitively explores social issues, highlighting the lower strata of society and their life tragedies. By staging the play, which the author himself described as a Berlin tragicomedy, the director, while speaking about early 20th-century Berlin, draws clear parallels with the present day.

At the center of the play are two women connected by the theme of motherhood. The maid Pauline Piperkarka is pregnant with an unplanned and unwanted child, while the worker John's wife is still mourning a newborn who died a few years ago. The child connects not only the two women living their personal lives, but all other dramatic events, unfolding more or less prominently on stage, become directly related to the fate of Pauline's child and his two future mothers. The action takes place in a closed space – in the theatre studio of the former theatre director Harro Hassenreuter, among old theatre props and costumes, where Pauline's baby is born. A detective story soon begins, involving other residents of the house and the police, leading to a tragic denouement.