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Energetic black comedy 'Radiant Vermin' suffers sagging script

I would be willing to bet that much of Inis Nua Theatre's regular audience is familiar with Philip Ridley, the playwright of the current production, Radiant Vermin. He's a dark, creative polymath, a filmmaker (The Reflecting Skin), songwriter (collaborated with PJ Harvey), photographer, and performance artist who ran alongside such "YBAs" (Young British Artists) as Damien Hirst.

Miss Dee (Eleni Delopoulos) makes Ollie (Adam Hammet) and Jill (Emilie Krause) an offer they can’t refuse in Inis Nua Theatre Company’s Philadelphia premiere of "Radiant Vermin."
Miss Dee (Eleni Delopoulos) makes Ollie (Adam Hammet) and Jill (Emilie Krause) an offer they can’t refuse in Inis Nua Theatre Company’s Philadelphia premiere of "Radiant Vermin."Read moreKatie Reing

I would be willing to bet that much of Inis Nua Theatre's regular audience is familiar with Philip Ridley, the playwright of the current production,

Radiant Vermin

. He's a dark, creative polymath, a filmmaker (

The Reflecting Skin

), songwriter (collaborated with PJ Harvey), photographer, and performance artist who ran alongside such "YBAs" (Young British Artists) as Damien Hirst.

This very black comedy isn't so thematically far off from what is perhaps his best-known play, The Pitchfork Disney. That script concerned a terrified brother and sister confined to a house that is ultimately invaded by malevolent outsiders. Here, a young married couple, Jill (Emilie Krause) and Ollie (Adam Hammet), become terrified and invite in the outsiders.

Jill is pregnant when they are offered a home by Miss Dee (hilarious Eleni Delopoulos in costumer Katherine Fritz's hot pink-and-floral power-broker drag), a very strange, possibly supernatural, public housing representative/real estate agent. In return for their tiny "estate flat," a government-built apartment, they must renovate a rundown house in a less-than-desirable neighborhood, and, Miss Dee hopes, help gentrify the area.

Since the possibility of a dream home is too tantalizing to pass up, they accept the offer and spend nearly all their time "working on the place," while warily eyeing a homeless encampment just on the other side of their neighborhood. Why the scare quotes? As it turns out, Ollie can't do all the work himself, and the couple's growing avarice leads them, despite their opening declarations that they are "good people," to do some very bad things.

As directed by Claire Moyer, Krause has enthusiasm that is infectious, even at the worst of times. She's delightful and giddy, leaping across Meghan Jones' brightly colored set, the skeleton of a two-story house. Hammet, by contrast, remains grounded, a humorously self-serious voice of reason in circumstances that defy reason.

If this were a frenzied 90-minute (or 75-minute) smirk at the bottomless consumerist appetites of the bourgeoisie, it would be enough. Instead, Ridley repeats himself, battering us with points that hardly need making - for example, the homeless are human - and leading us to a garden party climax that reveals nothing and takes forever to do so.

Despite Ridley's in-your-face bona fides, the real winners here are Radiant Vermin's actors and director, who keep the production's energy surging at the same time its script is sagging.