Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set by Trevor Schmidt, lighting by Larissa Poho, projections by Matt Schuurman
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
In a week when “housing crisis” and “starter home” got batted around like pingpong balls (in both our official languages) at the leaders’ debates, here’s a Faustian comedy that’s eerily in sync. It’s dark and smiley, snarky as hell, and very funny. And it was written a decade ago.
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Radiant Vermin, a 2015 satire by the Brit playwright Philip Ridley, evidently a theatrical denizen of the dark side, is made for the age when “affordable housing” is a breezy oxymoron. Like ours. It’s the perfect finale to Northern Light Theatre’s ‘Making A Monster’ season.
There have been been comedies before now that play in the real estate abyss — Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross for one; Karen Hines’ Crawlspace for another. But the tale of Ollie and Jill, and their mysterious acquisition of their dream home isn’t really about sleaze of The Deal, and the treachery and misrepresentation that go into landing The Deal. And it’s not just about the eternal question of whether the end justifies the means. With claws that feel freshly sharpened in Trevor Schmidt’s production, Radiant Vermin digs into wondering about the end, itself, that’s getting justified.
Do you have skin in the real estate game? You do, my friend with the clean hands, even if you’re 35 and still living in your parents’ basement. Mainly because it’s all about moral compromise. Self-perpetuating consumerism and greed … a morality comedy that puts the hell back in Hello. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
The couple we meet in Radiant Vermin are charming and peppy, eager to engage with us and get our approval. And our approval will, in the end, damn us. But that complicity is a gradual viral process in Schmidt’s smartly calibrated production.
You’ve got to really like Ollie and Jill for Radiant Vermin to work. And, by gawd, you really do, in winsome, funny performances from Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk. Jill is pregnant, and uses that to rule the roost, in a beaming passive-aggressive way that Matkin captures hilariously, like a screwball heroine. Yaschuk’s Ollie is more awkward, with an improvising eager-beaver nerdiness about him that makes you want him to survive and prosper, in his double role as husband and new father to be.
The characters these two fine highly watchable young actors create have a kind of full-disclosure wholesomeness as they remember and re-create their dream home experience. There’s no shocking us — and Radiant Vermin is shocking, in its incremental way — without that rapport.
Jill and Ollie are onstage, in front of a chalky white two-dimensional house (designed by Schmidt), to confess to us, they say, and gain our understanding, which they’re pretty sure will be forthcoming. They have a kind of full-disclosure wholesomeness about them, as they remember and re-create their dream home experience, step by step. And they acknowledge us all along the way in asides; at one point Jill even consults us directly, asking for a show of hands.
Our struggling newlyweds live in a squalid council estate, where drug deals and suicide are the chief activity, with no hope of home ownership. Their ascent on the home ownership ladder starts with a letter from a mysterious Miss Dee offering a foothold into the property market. A free fixer-upper in a derelict neighbourhood, no strings attached, can be theirs. They’ve been chosen to be part of a government initiative to reclaim derelict neighbourhoods: Social Regeneration Through The Creation Of Dream Homes.
It’s almost too good to be true. Yes indeed. Ollie has some residual skepticism (is this a joke on the “desperate underclass?”), but he squelches it in the euphoria of the moment. Jill says “we did it all — for Baby!” a justification she’ll use again and again in the course of Radiant Vermin.
Holly Turner as Miss Dee in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set and costumes Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho, projections Matt Schuurman.
Miss Dee, played by Holly Hunter in grand Mephistophelean style — red power trenchcoat, tigerish smile, a contract as long as the Dead Sea Scrolls to sign — has a star entrance. “You’re good people,” she assures Jill and Ollie. The program, she says, is all about creating a “property hotspot” to attract other buyers. And suddenly, lurid flames seem to flicker behind the blank windows of the white house. The lighting by Larissa Poho and Matt Schuurman’s projections are, to say the least, an active participant in the storytelling, as the renos proceed in room by room transformations. And Chris Scott’s score is horror channelled through sitcom.
After a horrifying accident with a vagrant intruder, suddenly, magically, Jill’s perfect dream kitchen materializes. And it keeps happening, with the picture-perfect hallway. And the bathroom! I’m reluctant to tell you why and how. Let the shock be yours. Anyhow, at every horrifying stage, the ante is upped, along with the pace of Ollie and Jill’s self-justifications. Just when you think they’ve arrived at the finish line, the finish line gets moved. They want more; sorry, they need more,.
Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.
Gradually neighbours do move in; the Never Enough Shopping Centre is about to spring up in the footprint of a derelict factory. And the apotheosis of upward mobility is a garden party to celebrate Baby’s first birthday. Matkin and Yaschuk populate the festivities with all the neighbours, “the party from hell” as Ollie describes it, in a virtuoso comic scene.
Radiant Vermin has things to say about how thin and peel-able the veneer of morality is, and how supple humans are about justifying their choices. Jill has a brilliantly constructed speech about vagrants and social responsibility, beautifully calibrated by Matkin, in which she smugly extolls her Christian values, defends the homeless, and morality gradually gets skinned alive.
“It’s people like us,” she concludes, “who’re standing between civilization and chaos.” As Miss Dee has reassured us, it’s a good thing we’re all good people.
REVIEW
Radiant Vermin
Theatre: Northern Light Theatre
Written by: Philip Ridley
Directed by: Trevor Schmidt
Starring: Eli Yaschuk, Rain Matkin, Holly Turner
Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: through May 3
Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com
