Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
In every dream home there is heartache and a whole lot more in Philip Ridley’s 2015 play, which receives its Scottish premiere in Johnny McKnight’s dangerously madcap Tron company production. Here we’re invited in to Jill and Ollie’s remade and remodelled des-res in the tellingly named Gilead Close, where the young couple take stock after being tempted away from the roughhouse estate they were previously stuck in by a pink-clad saviour calling herself Miss Dee.
Like a garishly clad snake in Eden, Miss Dee offers Jill and Ollie a new house for free. Only the much needed renovations of their new abode are the couple’s responsibilities. With the Faustian pact signed, sealed and delivered, Jill and Ollie take their upwardly mobile ascent on board with relish. In an urban wasteland rife with homelessness and crime, their discovery of a short cut to home improvements transforms both their lives and the neighbourhood. With the traditional local demographic biblically wiped out, Gilead Close is very much on the up.
Ridley’s play is a gloriously fantastical dissection of the sort of social engineering and gentrification that is at the heart of Britain’s housing crisis, delivered with an ingeniously wicked sense of satirical fun. This tone is picked up here by McKnight with similarly venomous intent.
The double act of Dani Heron and Martin Quinn play Jill and Ollie with a rapid-fire delivery that becomes a kind of absurdist vaudevillian confessional. Heron and Quinn’s grotesque series of impressions of the couple’s assorted neighbours from hell becomes a show-stopping routine in itself. Similarly, as Miss Dee, Julie Wilson Nimmo frames everything she does with an arch malevolence that suggests a more celestial power at play.
Played out on designer Kenny Miller and lighting designer Emma Jones’ house shaped light box set, and punctuated by Patricia Panther’s glitchtronic soundscape, McKnight’s increasingly manic production ramps up the anxieties of the property ladder with abandon. Whatever Miss Dee promises in this devilishly incisive affair, the crash is inevitable.
The Herald, July 1st 2024
ends
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