A Student Essays: Mercury Fur (Riot Productions)

Philip K. Dick notwithstanding, most futurological writers are not prophets but fantastic commentators on their present. Mercury Fur seems preoccupied with a near-future in which law and order have decayed and, in a landscape of burnt out tower-blocks and abandoned homes, examines the conduct of an underclass for whom only the oblivion of drugs and offering dubious services to the wealthy can provide meaning and survival.

Name-checking various locations around London - and climaxing in the appearance of a city money-man who has an appetite for sexual destruction - Ridley's 'future' is a dishevelled remix of the capital, circa 1990. The disused tower-block that becomes the location for Spinx's 'party' could be one of the sink estates in Brixton or Kings Cross where the Housing shoved undesirable residents and the obsession with 'butterflies' and their diverse colours reflects the ravers' fascination with varieties of LSD and Ecstasy (mitsubishi or getafix, anyone?).

Equally, the finale - in which London is finally bombed by its own hostile government (as the city wanker points out, it has gone beyond the control of the state) - is a paranoid extension of London Alternative Culture's world-view, circa 1994 (check Spiral Tribe's own webpage for a spot of history that echoes with the fears of the party scene). Given that the Conservative government was enacting laws that made certain types of music illegal to play in public, this sense of oppositional wasn't exclusively drug-induced hysteria. Ridley's 'future' is a decaying urban infrastructure, ignored and then punished by the state, providing a lumpen proletariat, which preys on itself, for the wealthy to exploit.

Unsurprisingly, the debut of Mercury Fur was controversial - the fight-loving Lyn Gardner throwing down with Michael Billington to defend its integrity - but its descriptions of rape and casual violence are brutal but torn from the headlines rather than a sick imagination. By framing the murder of a child (dressed up as Elvis and provided as entertainment for a wealthy patron) in an almost familiar London, Ridley's point is clear: the horror is lurking beneath the surface.

The controversy about the content does disguise the weaknesses of the script: the subplot about the arrival of the mysterious butterflies that fuel the drug trade is given too much attention, reducing the play to a series of monologues interspersed with shouted arguments and the gradual realisation that many of the characters are related forces story heavy interludes. But weaving a complex world around the central debate makes the question more urgent: can love, under extremes of pressure, become the motivation to kill the beloved to save them from harm?