When house prices are the stuff of outrageous fantasy, it makes sense for drama about the housing crisis to follow suit. So this cheerfully twisted social satire by Philip Ridley about a young couple willing to do anything — anything — to get a mortgage-free dream home is one of three plays on the London stage about the subject. Mike Bartlett’s Game, at the Almeida, gives us a couple trading privacy and dignity for free digs. Matt Hartley’s Deposit, at the Hampstead Theatre, gives us two couples sharing a one-bedroom flat while they save for a home.
Ridley — in full-on comic mode or as close as this dark writer gets to it — gives us a couple making a deal with the Devil. Or, as she’s known here, Miss Dee, who represents a secret government department that aims to regenerate knackered neighbourhoods by giving enterprising people homes to do up — and who lets them find out for themselves that killing homeless people in their new home can magically lead to the rooms refurbishing themselves. Yes. They don’t tell you that on Grand Designs.
There’s a bit of The Elves and the Shoemaker and a bit of Sweeney Todd in this vividly imaginative immorality tale. David Mercatali’s bare-stage production zips along with gusto, motored by astute comic performances by Sean Michael Verey as the handy Ollie and Gemma Whelan as the pregnant Jill.
Even so, 90 minutes proves too long for a show driven more by ideas than characters. And for all that Ridley is aiming for impact over subtlety, he hard sells his anticonsumerist message rather than letting us find it for ourselves.
“Would you do the same?” Ollie and Jill ask us pointedly at the end of an armageddon they justify because it’s “all for baby”. Yet since this freaky fable doesn’t worry much about plausibility because they are in little danger of getting rumbled, it’s hard to feel as complicit as Ridley wants us to.
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Radiant Vermin has enough verve to stay interesting, though, and its more visceral moments bring us up short. Jill befriends a homeless woman (Amanda Daniels) who proves compliant when she finds out that she is about to be killed. Jill, having a panic attack, finally registers the moral weight of their awful actions. At which point their smiling slide from need to greed takes lodgings in your brain.
Box office: 020 7478 0100, to Apr 12