A site-specific movement work, RAT RAT RAT staged inside the Old Operating Theatre Museum
Following the success of our Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut, where we received the Outstanding Youth Performance award from the Asian Arts Awards, EggGen returns this June with RAT RAT RAT, a site-specific performance staged inside the Old Operating Theatre Museum, one of Europe’s oldest surviving surgical theatres.
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Arin Lin
6/9/20262 min read
©️Rat Rat Rat
Following the success of EggGen’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut, where the company received the Outstanding Youth Performance award from the Asian Arts Awards, EggGen returns this June with RAT RAT RAT, a site-specific performance staged inside the Old Operating Theatre Museum, one of Europe’s oldest surviving surgical theatres.
Set in a space where, long before anaesthesia, operations were performed in front of live audiences, the work transforms the museum into an unsettling classroom of silent rat-students, obedience, observation, and quiet institutional violence.
Drawing from the histories of animal experimentation and the atrocities of Unit 731 during the Second World War, blending puppetry and movement, RAT RAT RAT explores how violence becomes normalised when it is wrapped in systems, routines, and instructions. Rather than focusing on a single act of brutality, the work examines how violence is justified through necessity, rationality, science, discipline, or the so-called “greater good”.
The production brings together a creative team with UK, East Asian, and international backgrounds. Set designer and dramaturg Selene Mingyue Hu, costume designer Freya Yuejie Li, and costume assistant Livia Yifei Deng create three distinctive rat costumes: soft, fluffy, and strangely adorable, allowing the rat-students to appear both charming and unsettling.
Movement director Jonathan Layton, an international choreographer with experience across ballet and contemporary dance, develops a movement language that gives the three rats clear personalities and narrative presence. Performers Xintian Zhao, Yi Huang-Shu-Yi, and Caiqi Yang bring experience across ballet, Chinese folk dance, and contemporary performance, giving each rat a different physical identity and narrative layer.
Sound designer Mira Yihang Zhang draws on Saint-Saëns while pushing the music into a more contemporary and unsettling sound world. Lighting designer Yaqi Sun, experienced in non-traditional venues, uses the museum’s architecture to build an intimate and immersive atmosphere. Props designer Joseph Jin brings together vintage objects and real antique experimental instruments, grounding the piece in a tactile history of observation, discipline, and scientific authority.
RAT RAT RAT also marks the production team’s first experiment with site-specific performance and puppetry. Led by producer Zoe Yingying Xie, with assistant producer Mira Yihang Zhang and stage manager Colleen Yizhen Li, the team brings experience from West End commercial productions, immersive performance, movement-led work, and international touring. Their combined backgrounds shape the project’s unusual mix of theatrical precision, logistical playfulness, and cross-cultural curiosity.
Together, the company creates a work that is cute, strange, funny, and quietly horrifying: a lesson in obedience where the rules are clear. Playful, disturbing, and darkly comic, RAT RAT RAT asks what happens when a system teaches everyone how to behave.
Ticket Information:
Venue: The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret(SE1 9RY)
Dates and Time: 14 June / 15 June,7:30 PM (30 mins)
Ticket Prices: From £11.55
Suitable for: Age 12+
For more information, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rat-rat-rat-tickets-1984672441699
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