From Page to Stage: Rat 333
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is in full swing again this year, sadly I was not able to go up this year but I thought while the Fringe is on I’d revisit the year that I was able to go up with Turn the Key (now Fiercely Spun) with their show The Cupboard, written and directed by Gemma Aked-Priestly. This time, when looking back at the piece set in Gothic Victorian London, I’m looking at the design for Rat 333 (also called Ratty) played by Jodie Garnish in the preview for the LET Showcase and then by Juliet Chant-Tuft for the Fringe.
Ratty was the only character in The Cupboard who was not an inanimate object so it was important for the character to look extremely different from the other characters, and out of place in the dark Tim Burton-esque world of inside the cupboard. I had some inspiration to draw off in the form of some illustrations that Tess Castella did during the original conception of the show; this where I drew the main inspiration for the look of Ratty with a fur style gilet and a lot of browns and creams with a head-torch to signify them almost as a miner, as they have tunnelled their way through to the cupboard. It was essentially trying to give the audience the idea of the rat without putting the actor in a mask and full fur.
In the design process I also decided for each of the characters to have unique face paint that added more to who they were. Obviously again for Rat 333 this had to be done in a different and much more natural way to the other characters so I looked at the faces of rats to understand what made them distinctive and what the main features were that could be transferred to signify ‘rat’ to the audience. After a first try at the LET Showcase that was a bit more cartoon-y we settled on a much more subtle look with just the pink nose and brown fur and a dark lip for the Edinburgh show which I think worked effectively.
To create the look we were very lucky that Jodie owned a vintage fur jacket that worked perfectly for the role. We bought a cream long sleeved top to go underneath to make sure that if the audience would see it, it would not just look human and we found the perfect pair of brown trousers in a charity shop when I was sourcing with Emily Dyer, who helped source some of the costumes with me. I made ears for Ratty out of brown card just by cutting out the shape and sliding them into the actor’s hair with hair slides. We then found the perfect shaped denim hat that gave a suggestion of the period, that I dyed from its original blue to dark brown so that it worked with the rest of the look and did not seem out of place.
During the run in Edinburgh we were finding that the fur on the jacket sleeves was falling off regularly and I kept having to repair it after each show. On top of this, Juliet found that she was getting too hot in the jacket on stage under the lighting. We combated both of these issues by cutting off the jacket sleeves and turning it into more of a gilet, like in the original designs, this meant that the fur was no longer falling off in chunks from the sleeves and Juliet was much cooler on stage. I was really happy with how the costume came out and both Jodie and Juliet’s portrayals of Ratty were amazing.
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