IT is – thanks to the global financial crisis of 2007-08 – a facet of Western societies that it is nigh on impossible for young working-class (and even middle-class) people to get their feet on the much-vaunted “property ladder”.
This is the premise of Radiant Vermin, the 2015 play by English writer and artist extraordinaire Philip Ridley.
What if – this darkest of dark comedies asks – there was a miraculous way of avoiding the twin perils of living on a sink estate or falling into the clutches of an avaricious landlord?
In Ridley’s drama, young couple Jill (who is pregnant) and Ollie are catapulted into the housing market by way of a too-good-to-be-true offer made to them by the curiously omniscient civil servant Miss Dee.
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Jill and Ollie have been selected for a programme whereby they will be given their “dream home” (sans water and electricity) for free, on condition that they renovate the property, thereby turning it into a beacon for the regeneration of the area.
No sooner have the young couple moved into their new home than Ollie accidentally kills a homeless person who has intruded into the house.
When the corpse evaporates and is replaced by the expensive Selfridges kitchen Jill had been coveting, the pair realise that they are being offered a demonically metaphysical route to the rapid renovation of their home.
The two-act play that ensues is a cross between Goethe’s Faust, the absurdist theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Dennis Potter’s drama Brimstone And Treacle (in which the fascistic Devil comes in the guise of a selfless carer).
In Potter’s play, Lucifer gets into a middle-class family home by way of the understandable desire of a hard-pressed mother to have some respite from her arduous duties caring for her daughter, who has been severely injured both physically and mentally.
By contrast, Ridley’s protagonists have moved on quickly from their desperation (which is magnified by the forthcoming birth of their child) to get out of a community blighted by poverty and crime. Now they are motivated by an insatiable desire for the shiny goods offered by rampant consumerism.
Director Johnny McKnight’s production is performed excellently (despite actor Martin Quinn having to channel his inner Barack Obama by killing one or two of the flies that infested the theatre on Wednesday evening).
Designer Kenny Miller’s sparse set is comprised of a simple outline of a house, picked out in ingeniously employed neon.
The couple’s misdeeds are recounted compellingly (and with twisted sitcom humour) by the superb Dani Heron (Jill) and Quinn (Ollie).
Julie Wilson Nimmo is outstanding as the sharp-suited, sinisterly benevolent Miss Dee (she also excels in another role which, although pivotal, cannot be disclosed without taking us into spoiler territory).
Act 2 – with its reconstruction of the “garden party from Hell” – draws virtuosic and hilarious performances from Heron and Quinn as they perform caricatures of the panoply of new (and ghastly) neighbours.
Outlandish, absurd and bleakly funny, the scene epitomises Ridley’s sharply pertinent morality play.
Until July 13: tron.co.uk
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