The Rat King

At Alchemy Theatre

By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Saturday, January 21, 2006. Page R10

Forget the vampires and chainsaws. The real horror stories of our time are the ones that find the earth ravaged, the skies full of poison and humankind just one more item on the endangered-species list.

Maggie MacDonald's The Rat King begins where the world ends, in a bunker-like space occupied by the last mad scientist at work on his final killing machine. His other preoccupation is to find a breeder-husband for the last fertile woman, his daughter, and thus to rise from the ruins as the "germinal man" of the future.

Any wizard plotting a comeback in an isolated venue, with a daughter who has never seen another man, is bound to remind us of Prospero, and The Rat King turns out to be a very loose adaptation of The Tempest. In this telling, Caliban and Ferdinand are the same person, depending on who is looking at him.

Shakespeare haunts the show in another way, since MacDonald has written the entire script in rhyming couplets. These veer between the high poetic diction of a would-be Elizabethan and the jingling patter of Dr. Seuss. MacDonald and her co-director/producer Stephanie Markowitz call the piece a rock opera, though it's really a verse play with occasional bursts of singing. So is The Tempest, almost every production of which struggles to find music to suit Shakespeare's song texts. Bob Wiseman's keyboard music keeps its head down, so to speak, yielding centre stage to the verbal music of MacDonald's script. The songs are closer to cabaret and vaudeville than to any form of rock, which is just as well, since the singers are not amplified.

This is a political show, as any work about environmental devastation is bound to be. The Prospero figure (Ed Cannon, played by Jeremy Singer) is a vicious descendent of physicist Edward Teller, though he has his comic side, revealed in grotesque fashion when he segues from confessing incest to boasting about how he fertilized his hydroponic fruit by hand. His daughter Carlyn (Magali Meagher) has to decide whether to stick with Dad and his us-against-them mentality or to re-enter what's left of the world with a man who at least is not morally damaged. It's not a very original dramatic crux, and the play telegraphs its resolution long in advance.

But the work overall has a kind of rugged vigour that, along with MacDonald's endlessly inventive word-play, keeps you involved. The most arresting sequence comes in a long shadow-play in which Carlyn's rescuer (the Boy, played by Glen Sheppard) recounts his fantastic birth and his childhood among the rats, who in this work serve as chorus and eventually as a symbol of all the species we've muscled aside in the name of civilization. Most of the principal performers are, like MacDonald, figures in Toronto's indie music scene. Singer (of the band Hank) and Meagher (of the Phonemes) have never done theatre before and their unpolished yet vivid portrayals underscore the DIY ethos of a show that sprang sui generis from no established theatre company. They kept up with the theatre veterans, Sheppard and Kathleen Phillips (who played Carlyn's exiled, damaged sister Carson), and one non-actor even got off the best comic bit in the show. That was Reg Vermue (aka Gentleman Reg of the Hidden Cameras), who came on looking like David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane period and delivered a brief perfect turn as the careless Suitor.

The design, by Rose Bianchini and Jason van Horne, looked suitably cast-off and claustrophobic. It included a wonderfully creepy reliquary for the remains of Carlyn's mom, some effective school-pageant headgear for the rats and a clever use of prosthetics. Nicolas Greenland's fulsome lighting had me wondering, perhaps too realistically, where the power for all this bunker illumination was coming from.

The Rat King's political message seemed least clear when most bluntly put. "Don't wait till the end of the world to discover you're capable of being your own lover," the cast chanted at the audience at the end of the show. And there I was, thinking that MacDonald's beef was that we're too self-absorbed and oblivious to the wider world, not that we just don't like ourselves enough. Or did she mean that if things go on as they are, the wankers shall inherit the Earth, because there'll be no one else left?

The Rat King continues at Toronto's Alchemy Theatre (133 Tecumseth) through Jan. 22.