"Allens is rotten here! Allens undermined, eaten away by rats and mice", notes the foreman John. The world he lives in is hollow; it circles on the edge of the abyss. Its inhabitants are lost people: a run-down theatre manager, his sick wife, a drug-addicted actress, a poor student and his lover. At the center are the childless Mrs. John and her husband. A child! - there would be meaning, perhaps even fulfilment. Pauline Piperkarcka, an outcast, a stranger, gives birth to a child. She cannot keep it. It will probably die. So Mrs. John takes it from her, gives her money for it, passes the infant off as her own. But Pauline can't bear that. So begins an unconditional struggle: for the child, for the right to a future, for hope in a threatened world.
Gerhart Hauptmann's famous tragicomedy was written on the eve of the First World War. Half expressionist metropolitan vision, half analytical social drama, it tells of people under the pressure of inhuman conditions. Felicitas Brucker, working in Frankfurt for the first time, takes a modern look in her production at the attempt to find happiness in a universally threatened world.
Text source and further information about this event: https://www.schauspielfrankfurt.de/spielplan/die-ratten/3192/
