Radiant Vermin: Philip Ridley’s dark comedy brings housing crisis into focus

There was a lot she loved about it, but it also made her uncomfortable. For the Scottish visitor, it was hard to reconcile herself to such disparities of wealth.

“We were house-sitting in a friend’s house in a really lovely area,” she says. “We were really grateful for it, but the thing I could never get my head around was you would never see the homeless. But if you went out for dinner, you’d be sitting out, and there’d be somebody with a trolly crossing the road. One of the neighbours said, ‘We just don’t see that.’ It never sat right with me. The haves and the have-nots divide was so massive.”

That awkward feeling chimes with the theme of Radiant Vermin, a dark comedy by Philip Ridley in which Wilson Nimmo stars as Miss Dee, a kind of modern-day Mephistopheles with a wicked bargain to make.

This Scottish premiere is running at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre and is about expectant parents Jill and Ollie, who are desperate to climb the housing ladder. When Miss Dee offers them a house for free, supposedly as part of a government scheme, they jump at the chance.

They are overjoyed with their dream home, but it comes with a catch. In return for their comfort, the couple, played by Dani Heron and Martin Quinn, must make some grisly choices. Their free ride to luxury living is at the expense of society’s most vulnerable.

“It’s asking a lot of questions that make the audience squirm,” says Wilson Nimmo. “That’s exciting because you come out asking yourself questions.”

Funny and political in equal measure, Radiant Vermin satirises our readiness to behave callously in return for personal advantage. The actor says it walks the same uneasy edge between comedy and horror as Inside No 9, the BBC anthology of tales of the unexpected by Steve Pemberton and Reese Shearsmith.“Inside No 9 is a good reference,” agrees director Johnny McKnight. “There’s a fairytale quality to it and it feels like a thriller. It is about a couple who get offered a house, somewhere they can call their own, then asks what do you do to keep it? How far will you go? You just need to watch reality TV to see people are willing to go quite far.”

He adds: “It’s a suburban version of Faust about estate agents and property. What do you sell to the devil and what do you get back from it?”

For the two of them to be staging a comedy comes as no surprise. Wilson Nimmo, still remembered fondly as Miss Hoolie in Balamory, has brought her daffy comic touch to everything from the Tron panto to Scot Squad.

McKnight, meanwhile, has written and directed some of Scotland’s funniest pantos over the past two decades, not to mention being the country’s foremost dame. He has written Oran Mor’s summer panto, Mumbelina, also opening this month, and will be back on the Tron stage later this year in Peter Panto And The Incredible Stinkerbell.

Neither of them, though, is associated with the kind of gothic darkness that Ridley has made a speciality. Making his mark with The Pitchfork Disney, a nightmarish tale of violence and neglect, the playwright was at the vanguard of 1990s in-yer-face theatre, as well as turning out horror movies, visual art and novels.

Behind the surface sheen of comedy, Radiant Vermin has a purpose that McKnight relishes. “A very dark wit runs through it and that is what I love,” says the director. “It’s a dark story, but it’s told in a frothy, light way. That feels relevant to now: terrible things being done, but people trying to portray greed as a positive thing: ‘This is for me and I deserve this.’”

Wilson Nimmo agrees: “The themes are shocking, without a doubt, but Johnny is doing it in a certain way that I suspected he would do and that’s why I know it’s in safe hands. You never know what people’s reactions will be, but if we’re going to get in any trouble, I’d rather get in trouble with Johnny! We’ve worked together loads, and we love the carry on, but Johnny knows how to give me a wee push.”

The play premiered in London in 2015 when its commentary on materialism struck a chord in a nation dealing with a housing crisis. In the intervening decade, that crisis has only worsened.

“It feels like pots are on a boil,” says McKnight, worrying about how a generation ten years younger than him will ever afford to buy somewhere. “I’m in my 40s and I’m co-habiting a house with my pal because that was a way to get somewhere with a back door. I was lucky because I was on the property ladder with a flat, but even selling my flat I had 82 viewings in two days. My mortgage at that point was a third of what the neighbours were charging for rent. Some rental places are asking for a year’s rent in advance. What makes the play just as relevant as when Philip Ridley wrote it is that it asks, ‘What are people going to have to do to get a place that feels like home?’”

Radiant Vermin is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, from 27 June until 13 July