‘RAT’: INTERROGATION DRAMA WITH TWIST

Ron Hutchinson, whose “Rat in the Skull” opens Friday at Taper, Too, is a tall shy man with an improbable English accent delivered in a voice so soft as to be nearly undetectable. He stands and walks and gestures in angular spasms, like Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot, an ambulatory Cubist drawing.

The effect would be comical were it not for his spectral face and manner. He looks like someone who has just stepped away from a horrible auto accident. In fact, he uses a relevant term when discussing “Rat in the Skull’s” inception as part of “the collision between you as a political animal versus you as a human being.”

Hutchinson, 39, was born in Belfast, raised in the Midlands of Great Britain and now makes his home in his ancestral Cornwall (hence the accent, which, he says, “defies any philologist”). He was writer-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979, and it was the RSC that commissioned “Rat” in 1983.

“It’s an interrogation drama set in a police station in London,” he said recently over lunch. “You’re told a suspect bomber has been brutalized by a fellow Irish policeman. There’s a twist. The personal interrogation becomes a metaphor for the political reality of the Irish situation,” a situation Hutchinson views as both tyrannical and tragic.

“The English first got into Ireland 800 years ago, and it’s as fresh in Ireland as today’s bread. Three hundred years ago, the British planted the Scots in the North to defend against the French. They were my Presbyterian forebears. It was my people who were the dispossessors of the native soil. Politically, we have no right to be there. But I think of myself as Irish. One wonders what side to be on, or asks ‘What’s my future if I get out?’ It’s the question asked in Rhodesia, South Africa, and it pertains, in regard to the Indian, to your United States.”

The play’s setting is drawn from a personal as well as political backdrop.

“I was a fraud officer for the Social Security Department in England,” he said. “The challenge was to break somebody down without the threat of physical abuse. It’s a very unclean thing to do, to get inside somebody and get him to trap himself. But it’s fascinating to tease some wretch into submission. The chase is intriguing. If you’re in a position of power, the chase becomes the act.”

Of the title, Hutchinson says: “In this context, a rat in the skull pertains to doubt. This is one of those plays that charges on, taking you thither and thither, and every manager has tried to detach the title somehow. I’ll admit it’s the worst advertisement. But I want the audience to know that it’s not in for a musical comedy.”

“Maneuvers,” which opens Friday at the Carpet Co. Stage, is a new play by 30-year-old James Bloor and his first production to date. “It’s a two-act drama set in 1963 in an Army base in Georgia, and deals with four guys caught up in a homosexual case,” Bloor explained. “It’s about the interrelationships of men at a time when a doctor is called up to cure them.

“The germ comes from seven or eight years ago when my father tried to come to grips with my homosexuality. I was trying to extol the positives about being gay. He said, ‘Fine, I understand. But what if there were a cure? What if they came up with a pill?’ My feeling is that, with the AIDS crisis and the current social atmosphere, a lot of people are willing to believe that such a thing might be. What people outside of gay life don’t understand is that you don’t have a choice in the first place. There is an inherent goodness in being gay. It’s not right to condemn someone simply because he doesn’t think like you.”

Other openings for the week include: Sunday, “On Top of Red Mountain” and “Cleaning House” at Galaxy Stage; Wednesday, “The Death of Rosendo” at Theatre/Teatro and “Rashomon” at East West Players; Friday, “Devour the Snow” at PCPA in Santa Maria, “Jaguar: A Jazz Play” at Theatre of NOTE and Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight” at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium.