I Was a Rat!
Philip Pullman’s I Was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers, is a delightful twist on the Cinderella fairytale. Remember the rat who gets turned into a page boy to take Cinders to the ball? Well, in this story, he never gets turned back into a rat, and thus the adventures begin. From a circus to a science laboratory to a palace, Roger the ex-rat meets a wealth of eccentric characters, not all of them benign. Soon he finds himself the subject of an unwelcome and unpleasant media frenzy, and it takes the newly wedded princess to save him, at the same time as revealing that she herself is not all that happy with her new life.
Pullman cleverly uses the story to satirise the press, but he never loses the very human quest of Roger’s would-be guardians, Bob and Joan, to save the little boy from etermination. As with most of Pullman’s works, it’s beautifully crafted, with a dark edge and a bittersweet ending.
We first put on the show when I was still studying at Oxford. I have been a fan of Pullman’s ever since my mum brought home one of the first copies of Northern Lights, and so one day when I should have been writing an essay on Plath, I instead found myself in the children’s section of Waterstones. I picked up Rat and fell in love within a few pages. That night I tracked down Pullman’s agent and begged to be allowed to adapt it.
Within a few weeks I received a tentative go-ahead, and a few hours later Pullman himself emailed me asking to go for a drink. We went to a bar called ‘QI’ and I outlined my ideas for him. He can’t have been totally appalled by them because soon after I was signing a contract for the rights and approaching the Old Fire Station Theatre, which I’m told was in far better nick then than it is now.
This was the turning point for me as a director. Who knew that ensemble work could be so darned fun? We had a cast of nine, and for two weeks before the start of term we worked solidly on adapting this gem of a book. We made several discoveries: firstly, that what might work well on page would not on stage. (Obvious, you might think). There’s a moment in the book where Roger and the Princess close their eyes and wish with all their might for the fairy godmother to appear again and turn them back into who they used to be. However, as it turns out, watching two people on stage with their eyes closed isn’t all that dramatic. Instead, we created some back story for the princess, thinking that if she was so unsatisfied with her lot she would have already wished for the godmother. And after all, this is Roger’s journey. So, we had Roger wishing with all his might, and the Princess holding his hands, crying silently because she knows his prayers are in vain. It really made the climax of the play, and a friend later told me that she almost cried at it (this is a compliment: she never ever cries).
The other thing that really made the show was the incredible music by Jessica Dannheisser. This was her first job composing for a show, and she’s gone on to great things since – no surprise there, she’s fantastic. The music was performed live on the balcony by some strings and a flute, and it was absolutely magical.
Pullman came to a rehearsal (one of my most unforgettable memories was explaining to him why one of his suggestions wouldn’t work – and marvelling at how unbelievably gracious he was at having this little student correct him), and then brought his family to a performance, where our marketing manager sat him down in the interval and made him sign enough posters for all the cast and crew. I managed to nab the one that he signed with the pen he’d used to write the book. Then he gave us the rights to take it to Edinburgh…
Lord, Edinburgh’s stressful! We had an 11am showing, which would have been fine with professional actors, but of course we had students, who wanted to go out every night and roll home at 4am and not want to get up the following morning. I became the nagging mother of the group: a role I wasn’t particularly comfortable with. In any case, Edinburgh presented fresh challenges. One of our greatest losses was the live music: due to budget and space we had to use recorded, and for me it just wasn’t the same. We largely got good reviews, apart from one person who felt it was too long. He was right: my producer sat me down with a black pen and a copy of the script and in twenty minutes we had cut about 4 pages out of a 24 page script. The result was amazing: all the fat had been trimmed and we were left with an electric, energetic play. The courtroom scene was one that had bothered me in the first production: it slowed everything down and didn’t really tell the audience anything knew. But in my head I felt that it was a climactic moment and therefore needed to be ‘long’. Oh no: we cut it in half and suddenly the tension in the audience went up about twelve notches – would the court sentence Roger to death? Would Bob and Joan win the day? Fantastic.
So, while it wasn’t an entirely pleasant two weeks for me, the play was, essentially, good, and it raked it good audiences throughout. The cast were a great bunch of people, and they all bonded incredibly well. That led to a number of ‘in jokes’ being played out on stage at times, which always irritates me (you’re playing for the audience, not for yourselves!), but perhaps I was taking it all far too seriously because I was just so tired.
It’s certainly something I’ll never forget, and staging this play has changed the way I do theatre, so you’ve got to be thankful for that.
