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"I Was A Rat!", exclamation mark, is about a boy who says he had been a rat. Now this
is the boy who turns up at the very beginning of the story on a doorstep on a winter's night,
I suppose. And it's a house belonging to an old couple who in the old fairy-tale way always
wanted to have a child and never did. Then there's the knock on the door and there's
a little boy standing there in a sort of tattered page's uniform and he says "I Was A Rat!"
That's all he can say, "I Was A Rat!" And so of course they take him in and they look
after him and all sorts of adventures follow.
When I was writing "I Was A Rat!" there were a couple of things going on in the background
in what you might call current events. One was the perennial issue of the newspapers
and how they distort the stories and inflame popular opinion about this that and the other.
They turn on a sixpence and they want everybody to hate this person, then they want everybody
to love this person. It's so hypocritical and such a crazy way of behaving it seemed
to me to be worth satirising a bit. The other thing was the princess angle. I won't say
too much about that, but there was a connection in my mind between a real princess and the
princess in this story and I thought it would be interesting just to touch on it a bit and
show a parallel there without hammering on the matter or making it too obvious, but it's
there if you want to look at it.
In my earlier life, I was a teacher. That was a long time ago, before the National Curriculum
or anything like that came in. And I had a sort of free hand. One of the things I wanted
to do every year with the children I taught, in the middle school age 9-13, and I wanted
to do a school play every year and I wrote them. I wrote seven or eight plays, one a
year and i put them on. That was enormous fun. I had such fun doing it. Such pleasure
I got out of it and I could have stayed happily doing that for the rest of my life. I used
to find it most enjoyable and most rewarding of all when I saw the whole audience, children
and adults, laughing at the same time or sitting waiting for what was going to happen next
at the same time. I loved that. That was my reward, really. And whenever I've written
a book after that, some of whose audience I think will be children, I always hope that
if their parents read it, they get the same sort of pleasure that their children are getting.
If they're sharing it at bedtime or something.
That's very much the sort of expectation I have of a play that anybody else makes of
my books. That it would be a show that the whole family will enjoy and enjoy in the same
way at the same time. i don't mean some clever wordplay for the grown-ups and a bit of silly
slapstick for the children. I don't mean that at all. I mean everybody enjoying the same
things at the same time. And I think the way to do that is to put people with whom we sympathise
deeply into situations that are difficult or painful or dangerous or exciting or funny
and then you hope that everybody will respond in the same way.
I'm very excited by the idea of this particular production, because I gather that it will
have all sorts of other dimensions: music and acrobatics and performance of every kind.
I know that the tradition that it will come out of is that of Italy: the Italian Commedia
De L'Arte. Which is a tradition I love. I've never worked with a Commedia De L'Arte troupe,
but I wish I had. I wish I'd had a chance to when I was younger. I've never laughed
so much as when I saw a company, an Italian Commedia De L'Arte company, perform a play
at the Oxford Playhouse. They reduced me to absolute apoplexy with merriment. It was just
so funny and it was the tradition that did it. That way of performing, of being a mask,
yet being a human as well and that's what I hope very much will happen with this play
as well.
I've had a couple of conversations, fascinating conversations, with Theresa the Director.
I think we quickly realised we were on the same wavelength when it comes to storytelling
and comedy, so I'm sure she'll make a wonderful job of it. It's just so interesting watching
how people tell stories. This production will be able to tour and that's a great joy to
me as well, because it's nice to think that people in this city or that city or this region
or that region will also be able to see the work that the cast and the director and the
scriptwriter and everybody else has put into it and see the story that I made. That's a
nice thing. And it's also a nice link to the old days of the travelling theatre when actors
would trundle in their cart from one marketplace to another, put out their rudimentary bitof
scenery, act away, collect their money, pass the hat around and then move on again. That's
a nice link as well.
The Birmingham Rep has been an ornament to the nation for a hundred years and it's a
great privilege to be part of the hundredth anniversary, the centenary celebrations. So
I'm very, very proud that that's happening and I hope it does them proud.