Review by Simon Jenner, September11 2025
How do vermin claw their way into a pastoral scene? Not squirrels, and not there. Perhaps they’ve been there all along, A couple first meet on a train halted in countryside: a would-be suicide is talked out of his attempt by a negotiator. Then the suicide does something startling, terrible; and the young pair kiss passionately. Welcome to actor Benny Ainsworth’s second play Vermin directed by Michael Parker at Park Theatre 90 till September 16. Vermin is paired with (God Save My) Northern Soul on the same evening.
Ainsworth himself takes the part of Billy, and Sally Paffett his partner Rachel. Expressively they’re beautifully matched and you’re hooked into the laser-focused delivery and vocal clarity, even as voices are raised and traumas deepen. That’s necessary as every word counts here. Writing is tight but never over-telegraphic. Its fifty-five minutes seem an epoch gone in a flash.
Photo Credit: Michael Parker
Ainsworth and Paffett engagingly introduce themselves as a TV twosome might. They take it in turns to introduce their story, interrupting, occasionally chiding one another. They’re funny, goofy and then not quite. You sense they’ve been on an interesting journey after the railway one; and they want to share it. They’ve been through much and start with loved-up humour. As the telling proceeds, they bicker rather than banter, and move to monologues. Can their love survive whatever tensions they keep finding? They’re here so it must have worked out. It all starts though with scratching.
Billy and Rachel are magnetically attracted ‘like animals” and marry in four months. They need a three-bedroom flat, and it soon becomes apparent that Billy’s snoring loudly has them sleeping apart in separate rooms; and there’s baby Alice. Or it would be, though Alice is stillborn. This is speeded over early as Billy’s obsessed with rats infesting the place. Traps won’t cut it, or them.
Rachel takes a more sanguine approach. Soon whilst Billy’s out, she sees the rats staring back, quite unafraid. Rachel is too. Soon she’s happy to have several climb on her arms and nuzzle her neck. Billy, who’s had form with animals in his early teens, takes a very different view. Soon Rachel heads to the local pet shop, and keeps her door locked.
It’s a magically empty space, with no set bar two chairs. With Alex Lewer’s lighting and Parker also working any technicals, and Ben Sorab’s very subtle sound design, everything’s remarkably tight.
Ainsworth, whose creation this is, fleshes out (that’s a term used advisedly) Billy’s trigger OCD, his wormholes and wrigglings, and plausibly suggest how early obsessions return. Ainsworth though invokes the dark of billy’s childhood obsession without trying to pathologise it. It’s there, there’s violence a long way back, but internal. Billy’s father was an obsessive handyman with a shed. So Billy’s masterpiece can only be a pale echo as a shed goes. Quite what he puts his uses to are another matter. Ainsworth’s billy is a chilling but not inhumane creation. Writer and actor are one.
Photo Credit: Michael Parker
Paffett segues gently from enthused and rapturous lover to quizzical to anxious and hostile. One plot-point revealed and glossed over early on though is brought back at a key point: not chronologically, but to illumine Rachels’ developing feelings and decisions. Both characters’ rationales are compellingly-drawn and you recall that from the start this couple first kiss near bloodshed. Parker allows the actors and stories lungs, even if their lungs are on fire with exertion. There’s pauses as Rachel’s telling, or Billy’s stare, soak in what they’re conveying. Moments of togetherness start with a whirl and end in a different attentiveness.
Premiered at the Arcola, this is the most riveting two-hander you’ll see this year; it’s not for the faint-hearted. Writing, acting and burned-off minimal staging draw us into hell, and its epiphanies. Outstanding.
Marketing Francesca Gresgon, Poster and marketing Designer Meurig Marshall, Photographer Michael Parker.
Photo Credit: Michael Parker
