The rats

On 19 June, the performance will be subtitled in English

Director Augustas Gornatkevičius is the winner of the annual contest DramaTest Residency, organized by the State Small Theatre of Vilnius, for this contest he presented Hauptmann's play "The Rats". 

The production is directed by the young generation director Augustas Gornatkevičius, whose artistic style the Lithuanian audience has already come to love and appreciate. This time he has brought together a team of renowned and talented actors from different theatre schools to present one of the most staged plays by Nobel Prize winner Gerhart Hauptmann, "Rats", which he wrote just before the  award. Hauptmann, a prominent German writer, creates vivid psychological characters and sensitively explores social issues, highlighting the lower strata of society and the tragedies of their lives. In his play, which he himself described as a Berlin tragicomedy, the director speaking about Berlin in the beginning of XXth century draws striking parallels with today.

The play centres on a housekeeper Mrs John, the archetype of all mothers and wives. The order of the theatre director Harro Hassenreuter's costume loft, John's own home, family, brother, husband all depend on her... But there is so much more that can encompass a woman—a baby would fill her life, while Pauline Pipercarca, a young maid, is expecting an unplanned and unwanted child. Their meeting in an attic crammed with old costumes and props is the start of a detective story that will involve the inhabitants of the house and the police, leading to a tragic conclusion.

According to the director A. Gornatkevičius, the play "Rats" is primarily about social exclusion and inequality, and it highlights the deep causes of alienation and radicalisation of a society. The encounter of different social strata in one enclosed space in the work reveals the different perceptions of the world and the goals these groups have for themselves. The portrait of a woman in "Rats" is particularly vivid, raising not so much the issue of inner desires and fears, but the issue of the surrounding environment and imposed roles, as well as the issue of the autonomy of the body, which is being so vividly reconsidered in the Western world today. With its storyline and subtle humour, the work once again reminds us of the true joy of a strong dramatic work on the theatre stage.

Following Henrik Ibsen in his first works, Gerhart Hauptmann quickly turned to naturalism, not only continuing the tradition of Zola, but also changing it fundamentally. His first play, "Before Sunrise", which tells how the pragmatism of the characters overcomes the humanity of feelings and the nobility of aspirations, caused one of the greatest scandals in the history of German theatre and is considered one of the most striking works of naturalism. Without shying away from social criticism, the author does not shy away from pessimism in his work. Interestingly, this did not prevent the writer from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, which at the time was awarded for idealistic works, thus further emphasising the importance of the author's voice in society.

It is not the first time that director Augustas Gornatkevičius has encountered Hauptmann's dramaturgy—in 2017, he staged the play "The Lonely Ones" based on the play "Lonely Lives" at the Old Theatre of Vilnius.