A Dramaturg Questions: Mercury Fur (Riot Productions)

The Script
Mercury Fur runs at over two hours - longer than Forced Entertainment's Bloody Mess (which was good enough to convince a generation that their post-dramatic theatre was definitive, even when the company was churning out generic misery devised rambles) or Les Ballet C de la B's VSPRS (and that changed my understanding of dance's potential to express complex ideas). Does it deserve this length, or can it be edited?

There are two strands (at least) to the script: the story of the 'butterflies' and the social chaos that leads the government to bomb London. While these strands do weave together - it is suggested that butterfly use leads to a culture of drugged-up thugs looking for the main chance - they are distinct and not necessarily integrated. How can the production link these ideas?

There are a great many monologues. There is a character called 'party piece,' but each actor gets one in the form of relating a story from memory. If all of these monologues are kept intact, how can the play maintain pace and the through line of the narrative?

Elliot and Lola are lovers, yet they fight throughout. Does the script allow any space to reveal their intimacy?

The Space
The Assembly Roxy is a long 'stage.' How can you avoid spending time on slow exits, especially in the finale, which limps towards an ending (even though their are corpses and bombs going off)?

The acoustic is not great, either. What steps can be taken to ensure the speeches are always audible - again, especially in the dialogues)?

Scenography
Is it a good idea to use a mobile phone off-stage to make the sound effects for a mobile phone on-stage?

There is much made of the lighting in the flat being natural, from daylight (a curtain is pulled down to let light in). How can this be emphasised in the lighting score without asking for suspension of disbelief (which is the audience's to give, not the company to expect)?

What would the hair of lumpen proletariat gangsters look like in a 'post-apocalyptic' world? Would it be a

neat cut, or a bit grubby? Since there is chat about the need for one character to have a bath, and worries about the lack of hot water in the flat, is it possible to go too far in uglying up the cast?

Cast
All of the cast are young, but it is clear that The Duchess is the mother of Elliot and Darren. How can this be made clear?

Again, the age of the actors is a concern: do they have the stamina to maintain two hours of tough acting that switches between power dynamics? Given the content, do they have the emotional strength?

Ethics
There is some heavy duty stuff in Mercury Fur. Does it need a trigger warning on the publicity?

While it is great to see a multinational finance company supporting the arts, the description of their business (especially the line about 'what if there were 58,627 other just like them... they shared the same name') sounded a bit like something from Ridley's imagination. Are they a good fit for a play so steeped in anti-capitalist values?

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?

A Critic Writes: Mercury Fur (Riot Productions)

Clocking in at over two hours, and unfolding Philip Ridley's paranoid description of a dystopia bounded by the degeneration of order and the easy availability of psychotropic 'butterflies,' Mercury Fur is a bold choice for Riot Productions, but certainly lives up to their vision of 'theatre as an art form with a social purpose to initiate debate.' The eight strong cast conjure up Ridley's bleak future through a mixture of East End gangster poses and an increasingly hysterical series of emotional dependencies, climaxing in a suicidal clinch that questions how far love can save anyone when society is collapsing.

The young cast cope well with the challenges of Ridley's characters: in a disintegrating world, power dynamics shift, forcing the actors, by turns, from vulnerability to determination. Sebastian Carrington-Howell brings a vicious passion to Elliot, butterfly dealer and event organiser to the underworld: as his brother Darren, Tommy Rowe captures a drug-addled sincerity while Frazer Hadfield is a naive, enthusiastic Naz, who stumbles upon the brothers' 'party.' Only Oli Clayton is allowed anything like consistency of character: his 'party guest' is a swaggering monster, half city-boy wanker and half sexual psychopath.

The Assembly Roxy, a deconsecrated church, is an ideal venue for Ridley's messy city, lending a faded grandeur through the architecture and setting the inhumane behaviour inside an echo of past aspirations: unfortunately, the breadth of the stage slows down the action, as the characters pace to the dispersed exits. There is also a difficult acoustic, swallowing some of the lines, especially during the heated arguments.

And although Ridley is a celebrated - and fashionable writer - the script lacks the tautness of his later work. The ending drags and the slow introduction of each character reduces the narrative to a series of speeches ideal for auditions but less impressive when maintaining the tension and menace lurking beneath Ridley's most intense passages. Jocelyn Cox allows each character to have their moment, but this makes the pace lag: in exchange for powerful scenes between Elliot and his lover Lola (a terrified but sly Ku Boane).

Yet the ambition of Riot Productions is well served by the undercurrent of horror in the script, and their connection of Ridley's dark urban decay to contemporary doubts and disorder is timely. The script's preoccupation with psychedelic drugs and mind control mark it as a 1990s' text (Jeff Noon was working a similar vein in his science-fiction novel), but Cox and her cast and crew have demonstrated that it has relevance and dynamism even after the total victory of the capitalist spectacle.