That Pesky Rat
THE NEst, chichester Festival theatre
Adapted from the award-winning picture book written and illustrated by Lauren Child, That Pesky Rat is a funny, touching tale about a pesky street rat that is longing to be somebody's pet. A story about compassion, kindness and finding your place in the world. We loved bringing this much-loved story and its characters to life. With original music, clowning, larger-than-life characters and of course, great puppetry.
"A thoroughly captivating production brimming with energy, from this talented emerging company who fully engaged with the children and left with them full of smiles and with a newfound appreciation for the stage."
2025 -2026
meet the team behind the show
Peter Twose - Adaptor, Composer & Co director
Romina Hytten - Co director
Kate Potter - Associate Director
Angela Watkins - Producer
Alex Michael - Production Stage Manager
Caroline Bowman - Puppetry Designer & Maker
Grace Casey-Head - Backdrop Artist
A J Packwood - Prop maker & Puppet Maintenance
2025 Cast - Emily McAlpine, Lucy Tebb, Ella Bassett and Jack Mallender
2026 Cast - Daisy Roe, Daniel Farmer-Patel, Anna Moorley and Richard Chapman
That Pesky Rat on tour
Our show is able to. be packed up into a small van and pop up in a variety of spaces. The show has gone on two sucessful tours round schools, libraries and non-traditional theatre spaces to great receptions. Thanks to Chichester Festival Theatre’s funding and support all these shows (except those in a theatre) were completely free. We were so grateful they took this step to allow more young people to see perhaps their first ever piece of theatre. Our cast were brilliant at adapting to each new space and audience and after each show a short workshop was held where the audience got to learn one of the songs as well as the beginning principles of puppetry. We love that this show has the capacity to be performed in both traditional and non traditional theatre spaces and hope that we are able to tour to more venues in the near future.
The making of That Pesky rat
read a little more about our process
We received the commission from the inimitable Dale Rooks and Angela Watkins of Chichester Festival Theatre of a show that would be adapted from a children’s book and that could work just as well in a theatre space as with a minimal set up in a community library. It would be a show that would travel to communities to whom theatre is perhaps under-delivered and the tickets would be free to book. Various titles were under consideration but we were all keen on ‘That Pesky Rat’ - we loved how it was not only a story full of entertaining characters and action but also had themes that felt very relevant to today’s world.
We had our first production meeting down on the beach in Cornwall. It was here we began by adapting the text into a play script and then brainstormed as many ‘cool things’ as we could think of. It’s always a challenge to bring a story off of the page and from inside your head and onto the stage and we wanted to make the show as fun and theatrical as possible. We were very aware that this was going to be many people’s first experience of theatre and we wanted to deliver a show that was fun, funny, imaginative, playful, visual and that had pathos. One of the things we’re proud of is almost every one of those original ‘cool things’ made it into the show.
Over the next few weeks we composed all the original music for the piece with theme songs for each character and an opening and closing number. It was at this point we also came up with our conceit for how the story would be told. An ensemble of ‘Refuse Collectors” responsible for emptying the bins and cleaning up the alley behind a theatre would be the ones to welcome us into Lauren Child’s world and help Pesky tell his story. A story of what it feels like to live a life that feels ‘thrown away’. This idea carried through all of our approach to making the show. As much as possible we were going to use recycled and thrifted objects and costume to tell the story, showing how much value there is and what can be done with items that have been discarded.
Next came our rehearsal period. This was an essential time to up-skill our company in puppetry and clowning as well as developing the characters from the book. Lauren Child’s art style is bold and 2D and the characters leap off of the page, we wanted our actors’ performances to match. We would lead the cast through various physicality, improvisation, and clowning exercises and then develop our characters from these. Our guiding principle was always to be playful and brave. Through honing what we made together in these sessions our script began to take a more completed shape.