Above : Nicola Denton as Jill. Featured image: Michael Becker as Ollie and Nicola Denton as Jill. Photo credit: Clare Hawley.
There is no such thing as a free gift, when the gift is a house. Free gifts on this scale come at a cost. These truths are hammered home in Radiant Vermin (2021) with regards to a Dream Home giveaway with a macabre twist to eager first home owners. This recent play is a fun, endearing, accessible and over the top allegory.
This work in effective Australian premiere was given a solid fantasy-meets-reality-TV-couple-gone-totally-beserk veneer. It featured strong direction by Victor Kalka of its deliciously disparate characters and narrative elements. This local version of Ridley’s cutting social comment was well cast, with the onstage talent delivering accurate caricatures of over ten invisible and onstage personalities between them.
Studio Sputnik is a new theatre company on the block. Its creatives worked well with minimal but vivid sound and stage effects to create the ominous otherworldly atmosphere. The discomfort and edgy situation of a mysteriously offered Dream Home in a strangely sparse neighbourhood with homeless persons skirting the perimeter emerged eerily from the darkness.
Ridley’s style for this storytelling uses direct addressing of the audience, constant reference to the outdoors offstage and other unseen levels of the house. The blank theatre blackness, with only shiny streamers at its rear, house-shaped entry plus floor lighting suggest the weird nature of the grand giveaway to the protagonists and the weirder goings-on following this.
The great team work with easily believed chemistry from house-winning couple Nicola Denton as Jill and Michael Becker as her husband Ollie opened up the space and made sense of Ridley’s offstage references. The challenges of constant recounting of events as well as the jumps through time and predicament were also easily conquered by this cast.
Above: Nicola Denton as Jill and Melissa Jones as Miss Dee. Photo credit: Clare Hawley.
The svelte all-seeing ethereal real estate agent Miss Dee (Melissa Jones) was smoothly played with fitting supercilious supernatural smarminess. Her contrast to the young renovators and each of her sudden entries into the everyday were well timed and nicely directed.
There was also pleasing use of a variety of movement and energies from Ollie and Jill as the tale unfolded and the swirl into a glittery, grisly hyper-realism took over.
The pace of Ridley’s action and the couple’s enthusiasm picked up as it becomes obvious that killing homeless people morphs rooms in the ‘renovator’s dream’ dwelling . One by one new decor for yet another room appeared as good as winners from renovation reality TV shows, drenched in lifestyle channel trends and full of products from over-the-top design catalogues.
The actors responded well to this refurbishment of reality, and exploited the potential for entertainment in Ridley’s script. They took us boldly with them as the crazed plotting of killing the ‘vermin’ of society became the norm. We watched as the couple ecstatically described each powerful radiant corpse glowing with makeover-giving light on every new area, and moved into top gear for more of the same. With no commercial break or sagging in the momentum.
The knife-edge moment as greed shifted to paranoia and guilt in the murderous Jill and Ollie was subtle and sudden in Ridley’s sequencing. A cameo of the homeless Kay, brilliantly realised by the versatile Melissa Jones assisted in tipping the emotional balance.
Once this shift was entrenched, changes to the pace and tone of the play hurtled us towards the conclusion, with virtuosic stagecraft from all cast.
Above: Michael Becker played Ollie and was the producer of this play,
The haunting neighbourhood garden party at the pointy end of the couple’s incredible journey was alluded to at the play’s opening . When it arrived and was replayed before us it was a firecracker piece of playwriting. Repetition of motif or statements with significant demands on motor skills and use of the stage for the actors were all nicely handled.
Becker and Denton, who were already quite animated and interesting until this point, impressed anew with their stamina, accent, rapid-fire and quick-change characterisation as well as stunning physical and verbal unisons. The challenge of flipping between comments and reactions from three neighbourhood couples, children and a confirmed bachelor turned something of a single Greek chorus was managed with virtuosic energy.
Spinning through this tableaux of neighbourhood competition, upwardly mobile attitudes and a new-estate melting pot of people was the strengthening of guilt and hiding of fake renos provided as a reward for killing off the dispensible homeless vermin. All this in the story was uncovered by an imitated set ofsuspicious fraternal twins from hell. This true twilight zone as played by the busy two stars of the drama was very rewardingly paced and painted before us.
As the dreamy couple inevitably derailed and realised they must escape, this fast-forward scene became a highlight of the playwriting and acting. It was quite a supersonic prelude to the play’s denoument and a fine showcase for the capabilities of this Studio Sputnik cast.
This play was an attractive one to comment on the difficult Sydney property scene as well as the urgency of the same in Ridley’s UK at this time. Pitfalls lurking when daring to enter the world of real estate were convincingly exaggerated here. A sardonic nod to the renovation reality TV industry and the associated marketing gripping the globe was welcome and well executed at this inner city location.
Radiant Vermin was also the accessible and entertaining piece of reality-fantasy with which this new theatre group chose to introduce themselves to us. We look forward to Studio Sputnik, the brave new group on the block’s next hectic but no doubt safe-as-houses theatrical refurb.