Review: Northern Light Theatre’s Radiant Vermin features strong performances but doesn’t always connect

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Though finally free of mortgage debt, I still follow the antics of the Bank of Canada with morbid interest. High rates combined with the merciless upward push of housing prices can toss me back to younger days, when calculating what kind of wrinkled raisin I would be once my debt was paid off was a kind of sport.

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So I was inclined to like Northern Light Theatre’s latest production, Radiant Vermin, the 2015 play by British playwright Philip Ridley. The impossible housing market — increasingly a literary theme — is just one factor that can make the future feel bleak for young folks. That’s rich fodder for drama.

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As Radiant Vermin opens, lead characters Jill (Rain Matkin) and Ollie (Eli Yaschuk) explain their predicament to the audience. While they are now a young couple living in their dream home with a one-year-old baby named Benjy, it was not always that way. Six months before Benjy was born, the two were living in a rental complex where drug dealing and suicide were the prime amenities. But one day, the couple learns they have been selected to receive a free home in exchange for taking part in a government plan to gentrify a run-down part of town. All they have to do is show up and meet a bureaucrat named Miss Dee (Holly Turner), who is the devil in a shiny red raincoat. This is not a spoiler, though perhaps it should be. But Ridley’s play — a riff on the classic Faustian bargain — is very on-the-nose. Jill and Ollie will commit murder in exchange for a house that renovates itself upon every death. They justify this trade-off because they have a baby to protect, and the victims are disposable.

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It’s a comic satire, we get that — with targets that include the Catholic church, upward mobility and rampant consumerism. But something about this play fails to connect.

For one thing, it’s long and loose at one hour and 45 minutes for a one-act with no intermission. (Pay attention to the usher’s warning point toward the bathroom before you enter the theatre.) It’s also so larded with verbiage that even the good bits (there was a pretty funny line about Catholic priests and nice cars) feel like a life preserver just slightly out of reach. The fourth wall is broken on a regular basis as Jill and Ollie try to make the audience complicit in the sell-your-soul contract. (The deadly details of the bargain, by the way, are not explicit in this particular contract — which defies the genre’s convention).

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The emotional tone of the play is also problematic. The playwright sets up a cartoonish level of extreme intensity in the opening scenes and stays there, leaving characters with nowhere to go. By the time the climax arrives — a dance piece tautly designed by choreographer Ainsley Hillyard that takes place at an excruciating neighbourhood party — the exhausted audience might consider murder a fair price just to exit the theatre.

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Director Trevor Schmidt (also the NLT artistic director) does his usual magic with an elegant and spare set: the simple outline of a house is highlighted by lights that project a game-show vibe. Schmidt dresses Ollie and Jill in a palate of black and white that is all-the-more-stark in contrast to Mis Dee’s glamorous red togs. Matt Schuurman’s projections provide a hypnotic echo for the story.

Matkin and Yaschuk are emerging talents in the city, and while they knock themselves out in the roles — the dance scene is particularly well-executed — you can feel the weight of the script. Turner is an experienced actor with a deft touch who helps ground the production. But I don’t think the playwright meant for us to side with the devil.

REVIEW

Northern Light Theatre’s Radiant Vermin

Playwright: Philip Ridley

Director: Trevor Schmidt

Featuring: Rain Matkin, Eli Yaschuk and Holly Turner

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

When: Through May 3

Tickets: Starting at $25 and available at northernlighttheatre.com or by calling 780-471-1586

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