“It could have happened to anyone…”
Speaking personally, I hate rats. Mice I can deal with – they’re sort of harmless, or at least they look harmless. It’s not weird to keep them as pets, they make adorable squeaks, and they have a whimsical proclivity for cheese. Rats, on the other hand, are vermin. They live in your walls and eat your food and invade your space, and you constantly have the horrible nagging thought in your head that they might be just a few short centimetres away from you and there’s nothing that you can do about it.
“Big” Monty (Daniel Forber) hates rats too. The abrasive-yet-magnanimous head chef of a floundering restaurant, Monty keeps noticing a bad smell in the kitchen – his kitchen. So too do his brusque sous chef Rose (Alice Eatough), empathetic waitress Mercedes (Ella Hardy) and beleaguered landlady Rachel (Rosa Peterson). The only staff member who can’t seem to smell anything is “Little” Monty (Fred Potts), Big Monty’s former protege who has fallen on hard times and returned to the kitchen he calls home. Soon enough, though, the source of the smell is discovered: a dead rat.
Written by Harry Petts and co-directed by Petts and Jess Stockley, We Know the Rats is, on its face, about this dysfunctional group of restaurateurs attempting to deal with an upcoming huge dinner service that they are in no way properly equipped to run. The obstacles pile up one after the other – first the meat delivery delay, then the disgusting contaminated wine, and eventually culminating in the dead rat. And then another dead rat, for good measure.
Much of the play’s humour rests on this almost farcical escalation of events, with Peterson in particular being handed the most explicitly comedic character in the show. She brings impeccable comic timing and some incredibly entertaining physicality and mannerisms to the frenetic, stressed Rachel, aided by some clever choreography from movement director Samantha Martin.
But it soon becomes clear that there is more going on in the kitchen than just a rodent infestation, and indeed, probably the play’s strongest writing comes in its usage of the rats as metaphorical vehicles to comment on its characters. When the Montys find the first dead rat, they don’t throw it away immediately, as you might expect.
Instead they hastily shove it into a cooking pot, and Big Monty insists that the others must not be told about it. Get through the dinner service first, he says, then we’ll call the exterminator. All the while, the other rats are nibbling away at their food stores and contaminating the crockery, and their unsettling presence is a constant throughout the show.
All of this takes on a new dimension as Big Monty’s backstory becomes clear. He is still reeling over his sister’s untimely passing around a year prior to the events of the play, clearly having not yet moved on from mourning her abrupt and tragic death. And yet whenever the subject is brought up by one of his colleagues, he tells them to drop it, to move on, to stop mentioning her. Little Monty, who knew her when he was working in the kitchen a few years earlier, is distraught to learn that Big Monty has cleared out her room in his house, and this rift between the two of them deepens over the course of the play before eventually leading to the two falling out just before their big dinner service.
Big Monty’s unwillingness to deal with the rats is mirrored in his running away from his grief, actively avoiding any attempt to properly process his sister’s death and instead continuing as though nothing ever happened. Seeing the more emotionally open Little Monty again for the first time in years opens up the wounds that never quite fully healed, and his pain over the loss of his sister eats away at his mental state as the rats do the same to his kitchen.
This leads into an equally compelling commentary on masculinity, as Big and Little Monty are the only two male characters in the show and clear opposites in their relationship with their own gender. Big Monty is something of a typical man’s man, made clear in his often crude sexual jokes and casual homophobia, as well as his aforementioned attempts at stoicism in the face of loss.
Little Monty, who the emotionally intelligent Mercedes knows is gay, is clearly hurt by the attitudes of his boss and friend, but by play’s end both men are able to truly open up about how much they mean to each other, finally putting into words the father-son love that had previously been left only implied. The Montys are treated with genuine empathy by the script, neither of them a caricature and both sympathetic and realistically flawed, and they come out as a pair of impressively three-dimensional characters who act as perfect foils to each other.
The cast each take to their respective roles excellently. Forber is loud and charismatic, charming in his own way and clearly commanding of the restaurant he calls his own, but there is always an air of unspoken weakness under him that is resolved brilliantly as he strides back into the chaotic kitchen at the end of the play, clearly the happiest he has been in a long time. Potts is a well-chosen counterpoint, outgoing yet awkward and incredibly endearing as he tells stories that don’t go anywhere and attempts to rekindle friendships with people he hasn’t seen in years.
Peterson as Rachel is the show’s designated comic relief and, as mentioned earlier, is both funny and convincing as the mildly incompetent middle-aged landlady, and Eatough and Hardy, while their characters are perhaps not as prominent as they ought to be, still put in some impressive supporting work. Hardy brings an incredibly quick wit and thoughtful introspection to Mercedes, able to tell the others what they need to hear even if they don’t want to listen, while Eatough is both believable and funny as the uncompromising sous chef Rose.
Antwerp Mansion, a venue that is itself decrepit and abandoned-feeling, is used to its fullest extent here. Designer Lois Makinson creates a cluttered kitchen complete with food, tea towels, cleaning supplies, cupboards, piles of cardboard boxes with rat footprints painted on them, and even an entire fridge.
The counter acts as something of a shield between the characters and the audience – the actors spend most of their time behind it, but occasionally venture in front to deliver a monologue of some kind to the audience. I have to say that a lot of these felt slightly self-indulgent and at odds with the fairly naturalistic dialogue that most of the show goes for, but the performers pull them off well and they generally serve to flesh out the characters further, albeit inelegantly.
The repeated refrain of UMDS‘ We Know the Rats is that “it could have happened to anyone”. It’s applied to reasonably minor things at first, like Little Monty throwing away some of the stock, but we see it in a new light when Big Monty brings it up in reference to his sister’s loss – here it is not used to brush off an innocent mistake, but as a tragic reminder of how arbitrary and pointless death can often be.
And yet, despite its constant reminders of the capriciousness and unpredictability of life, it’s a surprisingly optimistic play all told. With some help from Mercedes and Rose, the Montys finally reunite and face up to their grief together, and they return to their disastrous dinner service with renewed enthusiasm. Losing someone isn’t quite as easy to deal with as a couple of dead rats, sadly – but with the right people, it’s more than possible.
