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.