In Riot King Art Market’s Radiant Vermin, Lisa Horner plays two people on opposite sides of a front door. As Miss Dee, an estate agent, she offers a young couple a fixer-upper house for next to nothing. As Kay, a homeless woman, she turns up at the door of the exact same house. “Who deserves the home?” asks Philip Ridley’s savage 2015 comedy.
On one level, the answer looks simple. Expectant parents Ollie (Ziye Hu) and Jill (Katherine Cappellacci) are desperate to reach the property ladder, and Miss Dee’s offer sounds like a gift. The couple recount, with escalating glee, the weird and creepy tale of how they came to keep the house. Beneath the housing satire sits a hard target: a consumer capitalist culture that sorts people into those who have and those who don’t have, and trains the first group to turn a blind eye to the second.
“There’s a lot of ‘it’s not what it seems’ in this show,” smiles Horner. She promises that “it’s full of surprises and secrets,” and expresses admiration for Ridley’s quick, rat-a-tat dialogue that “doesn’t lean into heavy passages… until it does” — in gloriously unspooling, meaningful speeches.
“A sucker for being asked”
It’s an exacting acting assignment, and Horner’s prolific career has prepared her uniquely well for it. She won a Dora Award as the Wicked Witch in Mirvish’s The Wizard of Oz, and played Madame Thénardier in Les Misérables and Beulah in Come From Away. She has spent seasons at the Shaw and Stratford festivals, and lately she has turned to directing and writing, most recently at the Foster Festival this summer. During the pandemic, she even stepped outside of theatre and trained as a personal support worker. She even did the job for a couple of years, which is why she names the people who do it “angels on earth.”
Having performed on stages across Canada, she has precious little left to prove, which makes her account of how she landed in this dual role all the more disarming. “Katherine Cappellacci and I had met a few years back at a party. Then all of a sudden, I got an email from her asking me to be part of this,” Horner explains. She did some research on Riot King and the play, and was completely won over: “I just think that independent theatre is incredibly important, vitally important. And I loved the script. The script is insane. It is so challenging and interesting and meaty that I couldn’t resist. And I was so chuffed to be contacted!”
“I’m a bit of a sucker for being asked,” she smiles broadly. ”When somebody is so kind and thinks of me for something, I’m always thrilled to be thought of.” The downside? “It’s a bugger to memorize, but when you get it, you know when you’re right (and you know when you’re wrong, which is what’s irritating!)”
Facing the challenge of homelessness
While the invitation was personal, the play’s concerns are decidedly larger. Director Sebastian Biasucci asked all cast members to research housing and homelessness, and Horner “went a bit down the rabbit hole,” though she insists she is “in no way even remotely as knowledgeable as I should be.”
The timing of this production of Radiant Vermin is unexpectedly propitious. On November 5, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government tabled a budget promising to end homelessness in Canada within a decade, with funding of $11.2 billion over four years. This is an ambitious goal, which is likely to be challenged by diverse and disguised self-interests of the type the play addresses: I still recall how in my own Willowdale neighbourhood, after all government approvals had been obtained to install 59 modular homes for seniors leaving homelessness, eleventh-hour community opposition and legal challenges stopped it dead. The homes spent years rotting in storage, while the project’s pricetag rose from $14 million to $36 million. The modules were finally craned into place on Cummer Avenue in May 2025. Lesson: everyone agrees we need housing for the homeless … so long as it’s not in my neighbourhood.
“People need a house. They need a roof,” Horner offers simply. “That is the bottom line on all of it.” So why do we look away? She has an equally simple thought: “It’s terrifying to think of being homeless. So I think we want to separate ourselves from homeless people by thinking, ‘well, there’s something that you did to deserve this.’ It’s too terrifying to imagine that … a simple set of circumstances could lead anyone to be on the street. I either understand it, I’m empathetic, and I narcissistically try to solve it. Or I ignore it and say, ‘It’s your problem, not mine.’”
The play works on this exact reflex, and it does so without didacticism. It asks questions but “gives no answers,” thereby closing the audience escape hatch of “Well, I feel lectured, so I’m going to turn it off.”. Every justification Ollie and Jill give in the play is one that we have all heard before. “Every sentence of justification” is handed back with a grin … and a dangerous, seductive charm. “Right until the very end, Radiant Vermin says, ‘You can have it too. This is what you do. You can have it as well. Don’t you want that?'”
“It’s the seduction” — and the sedation — that society offers which are the ultimate problem, Horner asserts. “It’s easy to be seduced into that behaviour. You keep us angry and you keep us confused and separated — and then distract us with the phone.”
Energy and attitude
The staging makes these arguments in miniature. Horner praises Amelia Mielke-O’Grady’s ingenious set design within the intimacy of the Red Sandcastle Theatre: “It’s easy to take a quarter billion dollars and build a house inside of a theatre. What’s hard is creating the same atmosphere.” A lavish dream home, she reasons, would flatter the very appetite the play indicts. Instead of depicting it, the actors describe their actions as they perform them. This spoken-word style, she notes, is “the way Philip Ridley wanted it”: in your face and aggressive.
And Horner is just in awe of Riot King, the Dora Award-winning troupe led by founder Brendan Kinnon, which is mounting the show: “They blow my mind with their energy and their attitude. These folks are the future, these companies.” Rehearsing with Cappellacci and Hu has also been a revelation: “I’m an older gal. I’ve been around for a while. It is just the most wonderful feeling to walk into a room and get to know new people. It really reminds me of my community. As we get older, we become a bit like solitary cats. You do your show, you go home. But with this type of work, it’s all hands on deck. ‘What do you need?’ ‘Let’s get together: we need to do a line run.’”
In the play, Miss Dee’s offer is almost free of charge. Horner’s invitation to audiences is just as plain. “We want people to come — just come — and be challenged,” she states. “You’re going to laugh. You’re going to be appalled … if only just by my choices!” Spoken-word theatre in a small venue like the Red Sandcastle Theatre, she offers, is “a way to really spend not a lot of money, and really see what theatre is about.”
“So please come. And please stick around after the show, so we can say hi.” In a play where nothing behind the door is quite what it seems, this feels like the one invitation with no fine print.
Radiant Vermin runs November 12 to 22 at the Red Sandcastle Theatre, 922 Queen Street East, Toronto. Tickets are available at riotking.com on a sliding scale from $30 to $60, with pay-what-you-can on Tuesday, November 17.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
