Kelly (Georgina Tack) is a difficult 16-year-old with mental health issues, a tricky relationship with her ex-military dad, and a yearning to run away from her comfortable middle class home. Working class Jacko (Jacob Wayne-O’Neill) is not much older than Kelly and lives rough in an annex to an abandoned factory. His mum’s violent boyfriend kicked him out of the house, so now he spends his days drinking moonshine, smoking weed, and dumpster diving. A chance encounter sees Jacko save Kelly from the hands of a violent crack-dealer. She accompanies him back to the grotty squat where he paints pictures of rats and gazes out at the stars. Can these two young people from very different backgrounds find a way of learning from each other?

The premise of Bram Davidovich’s Rat King is promising enough. The problem is that much of what transpires in the 60-minute two-hander feels hard to credit, primarily because the two characters are so thinly sketched. Aside from annoying her over-bearing dad, there is not an awful lot at stake here for Kelly. She starts out as arrogant, know-all teen, spends quite a lot of the narrative feeding Jacko platitudinous affirmations about getting his life together, and ends up pretty much where she started out. Tack does her best adding some emotional depth to the troubled teen. But there is really nowhere to take her and precious little evidence of the mental health issues that apparently bother her.

Jacko feels a tad more credible, due mostly to a highly watchable turn from Brit-school alumni Wayne-O’Neill. Wisely skipping over the sheer implausibility of Jacko’s talent for abstract art, he focuses on bringing out the appalling emotional impact of the young man’s life on the streets. One suspects in real-life it would take rather more than an evening’s fling with a bit of posh to bring about the kind of life-changing epiphany Rat King suggests, but at least this character is on some kind of journey.

With such a thinly drawn duo, any momentum their relationship has fizzles out roughly half-way through leaving the audience marking time until the all too predictable ending.

Writer: Bram Davidovich

Director: Mark Hilton

Rat King. Vault Festival.

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