Review: Radiant Vermin, Brewery Theatre

He’s been renowned thus far for a string of acerbic, often surreal social critiques – Leaves of Glass, Vincent River: but with Radiant Vermin (here getting its world premiere at Tobacco Factory Theatres’ Brewery Theatre), playwright Philip Ridley turns his hand to black comedy – albeit with that strain of clear-eyed, no-holds-barred social critique still much in evidence.

Ollie (Sean Michael Verey) and Jill (Gemma Whelan) are a broke but fiercely law-abiding young couple offered an intriguing way out of their mouse-infested flat on an infamous sink estate. The mysterious Miss Dee (an imperious, knowing and slyly charming performance from Amanda Daniels) is a smart-suited government functionary who’s picked out this young couple with their impeccable credentials (charitable acts, church attendance, his household know-how, her perfect taste) to be regeneration pioneers, pulling up a broken neighbourhood by its bootstraps and inspiring others to join them.

Ensconced in their new home, Ollie and Jill find more marvels in store. Specifically, Jill’s increasingly complex aspirations for her dream home are all being fulfilled – as if by magic. It just requires the couple, each time a new renovation is required, to perform a certain act.

The horrible outlandishness of that act, and Jill and Ollie’s increasingly inventive ways of achieving it, forms much of the black comedy of the play. And, looming through the dark, often manic laughter like two stern relatives at a party, are the play’s two big, chewy themes: our untrammelled, self-nourishing materialism and desire for stuff (so you’ve done up the bathroom. Great. But now that makes the spare room look tired!) and our empathy, or lack thereof, for those less fortunate than ourselves.

Verey and Whelan are both captivating to watch – she a nervous but fundamentally gentle and empathetic character whose Christian principles are tested to the limit by her growing social anxiety and spiralling aspirations: he a tentative, callow, detail-obsessed young man with a hint of the Private Pike about him.

One virtuoso scene late on has Verey and Whelan playing both themselves and their variously colourful neighbours, at an increasingly surreal and fractious dinner party: this extraordinary ten-minute section has the two actors whipcracking from one character to the next in a hugely impressive flurry of gestures and voices.

Daniels, too, is excellent both as the unrefusable Miss Dee and, even more so, as Kay, a homeless woman lured to the house as part of Ollie and Jill’s accelerating slide into darkness. In a brief, beautifully underplayed five-minute portrait, Daniels movingly sketches a broken life.

The bare set, with the performers enacting everything and everyone they need, heightens the play’s dreamlike, illusory world – a place where a desire for stuff and standing has begun to corrupt human relationships from within.

As ever, Ridley has some deeply serious questions to ask about modern life and its assorted follies and iniquities. The difference, this time, is that – ably supported by a superbly energetic lead duo – he has packed a hefty comic punch too.

Radiant Vermin continues at the Brewery Theatre until Saturday, March 7. See our interview with Gemma Whelan and director David Mercatali here.

For more info and to book tickets, visit http://www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/detail/radiant_vermin/