Rat King Gospel
The past has different effects on different people, Rachel, Finlay and Helen all having gone to school together and endured the barbaric trials of Dunglass Academy, playing games together to get through the days, Rachel having unconsciously taken some of those ideas and later turned them into a series of children’s books forming the Rat King Gospel, now feeling in some ways trapped as she wishes to move to adult fiction but undeniably successful.
At a book signing in Inverness Rachel is surprised and delighted to be greeted by her former classmates, but while Helen is also doing well heavy drinker Finlay’s life has gone further astray since the death of his mother, and reunited the former “smart, nerdy losers” consider where they are now and where they all came from, painful experiences shared and secrets kept and the true origin and legacy of the Rat King Gospel.
Built upon a difficult subject and delicately underplayed by the central trio of Rebekah Clark as Rachel, at first seeking gossip to turn into stories, Hannah Smit as Helen, genuinely concerned for her troubled friend, and Daniel McIntosh Brammer as Finlay, stagnant in life and unable to escape the trauma of high school, shared unevenly with him in particular bearing the brunt, Rat King Gospel is directed by Eveliina Karjalainen from an idea by Hannah Hewer.
Rachel’s stories built around the lowliest creatures, hated by all, it is through the rat king that change is enacted in her revisions of history, giving power to the abused, “doing good where we can, right where we find ourselves,” at Camelot and Hampton Court and also back in the day at Dunglass, the three adults now facing the consequences of actions they undertook as children but which were forced upon them, victims who fought back when they had no other recourse, now confessing their sins and unsure whether they will be met with absolution or accusation.
Rat King Gospel continues at the theSpace on the Mile until Saturday 24th August
