Rat King – Vault Festival

For about an hour or so, I was shaken by a journey of strong feelings being part of an immersed setting depicting an encounter one could relate to from different perspectives.  Rat Kingwritten by Bram Davidovich, directed by Mark Hilton and played by Georgina Tack (Kelly) and Jacob Wayne-O’Neill (Jacko) presents the story of a girl, Kelly, clearly from better-off family who meet Jacko –which sounds as ghetto– a man ingrained in his condition of homelessness as she was running away from home. They soon start developing a bond that goes into an uncommon story notably in uncomforting ways; the girl’s persistence to ‘fix’ Jacko and drag him into arts as well as Jacko’s obsession with her.

I was amazed by the actor’s performance and the staging of the piece. Choosing to set the audience in an immersed positioning was a successful choice for establishing boundaries and implicating the audience as ‘observants’ the same way we ‘observe’ homelessness. The piece portrays Jacko being a human before any condition of homelessness, thus criticizing to some extent the dehumanizing feeling we have towards homeless people.

 I was shaken and confused by the character of Kelly. Her character brought a lot of questions and uneasiness; this feeling of wanting to fix people, to put oneself in danger in order to feed one’s ego, fetishizing people’s pain, exoticizing one’s suffering to a point where the suffering homeless person becomes a subject of gaze. I look at this as a metaphor of the volunteering system and cycles that can be questioned. I went out of the piece thinking; how can we address social service and how can we do it better?

The tone was set by the production, lighting, and music. I loved the work done to present on stage a topic that may provoke feelings of uneasiness, much as the same feeling of uneasiness confuses us in the real world when it comes to concerns of ‘homelessness’ and ‘mental help’.

Reviewer: Marita Matar

Reviewed: 4^th March 2023

North West End UK Rating: ★★★