Review: VERMIN, Park Theatre

There’s something of the early feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper to the conceit of Vermin – the escape from a marriage tainted by violence is found not outside the house, but inside it. Except, in this variation, there’s not a ghostly woman beckoning the repressed housewife to freedom from within the walls, but a coterie of feral, diseased rats.

The staging for Benny Ainsworth’s play, revived from an Arcola run in 2023, is kept refreshingly simple – all we have on stage are our two actors and a couple of chairs, so we feel as claustrophobic as the characters do, trapped in their home with little contact with the outside world. And things are about to get very claustrophobic indeed, as married couple Billy (Ainsworth) and Rachel (Sally Paffett) experience vastly different reactions to the rodent life in their walls. Expect just a little onstage blood.

For Billy, the rats are an uncomfortable reminder of his We Need To Talk About Kevin-style episodes of violence against animals as a child, a tendency no amount of self-help book or understanding of his OCD can solve. Rachel, on the other hand, after suffering a late-term miscarriage some years before, is drawn to the rats and they to her, like some kind of a perverse Disney princess.

Within a tight, coherent 60-minute runtime, this foray into the violence lurking on the edges of ordinary lives contains plenty of well-placed suburban Chekhov’s Guns (the toolshed in the garden, or the locked bedroom door), and some clever structural decisions. Vermin starts off straightforwardly chronological, a rom-com narrative of how our central couple met and got engaged within three months; later on, though, the play has no qualms with breaking the narrative momentum at key moments to go back in time and show us that violence and body horror are not chapters in this relationship, but the entire book.

There’s also some awkward knocking on the fourth wall, which is kept minimal enough so as to not distract from the main thrust of the drama. Every so often, Billy and Rachel bicker about who will ‘do this bit’ for the audience, an implicit acknowledgment of both of them as unreliable narrators. There’s humour in these interactions, but like much of this apparent ‘dark comedy’, the laughter from the audience is hearty but uncomfortable.

Billy is especially well drawn – and well-acted by Ainsworth, who teeters frighteningly between blokeishness and sadistic glee – and the script manages a tricky and potentially problematic tightrope walk, drawing attention to the violent intrusive thoughts that can be a manageable OCD symptom while also not letting its clearly sadistic protagonist off the hook.

He is, however, an acknowledged manchild, admitting to only eating chicken nuggets and without many obvious redeeming qualities – it’s hard, then, to believe in the depth of his bond with Rachel. Beyond a scene, viscerally performed by Paffett, depicting stillbirth, and some other more vague allusions, we also don’t get much of a sense of Rachel’s relationship to violence before meeting Billy (in contrast to Billy’s several monologues about his childhood). When Rachel eventually gets happy ending of sorts (heavy emphasis on the ‘of sorts’), her triumph over her abuser would land more effectively if we had a fuller picture of her as a character.

It’s perhaps best, then, to see these figures not as characters per se, but as allegories for the violence that can seep into every corner of life, whether that be inflicted on ourselves, inflicted on others, violence to which we are witnesses or violence in which we are intimately involved. We all have our rats lurking in the walls, but whether we choose to suppress them or embrace them is our choice to make.

Vermin plays at Park Theatre until 20 September as part of a double bill with God Save My Northern Soul