Andrus Vaarik brings Rahauputus to Pärnu Endla

Director Andrus Vaarik’s production of Michael Cooney’s comedy Rahauputus premieres on Saturday at Pärnu Endla Theatre, ERR reports. Vaarik says the team has focused on portraying ordinary people caught in foolish situations.

Vaarik said he had not planned to direct a play, but took on the production after another project was cancelled and the theatre asked him to step in. He previously staged Rahauputus at the Estonian Drama Theatre in 2002, where it proved very popular with audiences.

“Back then, at the Drama Theatre, I could choose my dream cast, the best of the best. Now I got the cast that was meant to be in the project that was cancelled, and this cast is better,” Vaarik said.

The farce follows Eric Swan, an unemployed homeowner who has spent two years claiming benefits from the social welfare office in the names of fictitious tenants. As the cheques, forms and invented identities become too much to manage, he decides to end the fraud. But then a social welfare official arrives.

Nils Mattias Steinberg, who plays Swan, said he enjoys playing an antihero because the role lets him express things people usually have to hide in society.

Vaarik praised the play’s precise, effective structure. Michael Cooney, son of playwright Ray Cooney, has taken his father’s experience and shaped it into a tightly constructed work, Vaarik said.

“We have done everything we can to avoid playing fools. Instead, we play ordinary, lovely people who find themselves in very foolish situations, as happens to all of us from time to time,” he said.