What moral compromises has the Christian right had to make in order to lend its support to Donald Trump, a convicted felon? It is a question that goes through your head watching this sparky revival of Philip Ridley’s needling black comedy. How can anyone square their New Testament beliefs with all that bling, avarice and deceit.
Troubled by a biblical sense of right and wrong, Radiant Vermin is an extreme fantasy about self-styled good people justifying their immoral behaviour in the name of a consumerist god.
Jill and Ollie Swift are an expectant couple who stumble into a Faustian pact with Miss Dee, equal parts estate agent, government operative and tempter. If they sign her contract, they can get their dream home for free, each room kitted out in glossy-magazine luxury. The only cost is the loss of a few homeless people along the way.
Expressed like that, it sounds like a crude metaphor for rapacious capitalism, but played out on stage – not least in Johnny McKnight’s snappy actor-centred production – it is as funny as it is provocative. Ridley does not let us treat this as someone else’s problem. He knows we are all complicit in the economic machine, all susceptible to the pull of materialism, all likely to turn a blind eye to the true cost of what we buy. But we are all good people, right?
On Kenny Miller’s crisp outline of a set, only the shifting colour palette of Emma Jones’s lighting indicates the couple’s changing fortunes, their gains offset by Patricia Panther’s antsy electro sound design.
Dani Heron and Martin Quinn as the Swifts hit a hilarious line between guileless nextdoor neighbours and Macbeth-like social climbers. Under the spell of Julie Wilson Nimmo’s Miss Dee, who has the breezy nonchalance of a TV property show host, they pull us with them in both directions.
• At Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 13 July.
