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Words here don’t mean what we think they mean

★★★★☆

Mercury Fur is the second Philip Ridley play I’ve seen this term and I don’t even watch that much theatre. Ridley’s appeal to student directors is I suppose obvious. His plays aim to shock in the way that Beckett’s or Albee’s once did, but with the advantage of still being relatively new – not yet chewed up and spat, normalised, back out again by decades of their own stifling fame. At their best, Ridley’s plays shock a lot. And while Mercury Fur’s Hilary predecessor, 2nd Week’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe at the BT, often fumbled in delivering this promise, Mercury Fur has moments where it fully succeeds, where it really does shock. At the very least it’s a production which recognises that a ‘brave’ choice of play, while an admirable first step, needs to be matched by even braver choices on stage if it’s to stand on its own feet.

The Fastest Clock in the Universe is an apt point of comparison because at a basic level they’re very similar plays. A chamber-piece alternate reality with a dysfunctional but sweet pairing at its heart is carefully constructed, put under increasing stress by the intrusion of characters from ‘outside’, and eventually stretched to breaking point in a fiercely horrible ending. The relationship at the heart of Mercury Fur is between Calam Lynch’s too-literate-for-this drug dealer Elliot (“he’s read books”) and his younger sister Darren, played by Mia Smith, performances which for me helmed the play and were easily its best. Smith in particular swerves wonderfully between fear of her brother’s angry outbursts and the jittery childish enthusiasm which so often causes them – the opening salvo of dialogue between the two siblings has all the energy and verve that a play which begins with a doorway being torn open deserves.

Ridley’s dialogue is showily profane, expletives scattered throughout and often where you least expect them. At one point in berating Darren, Elliot mashes together a hyperspeed run of racial and ethnic descriptors and insults, leaving the audience to work out whether the effect is hideous or comic (see also: his definition of ‘alacrity’). Words here don’t mean what we think they mean. ‘Butterflies’ for example are hallucinogens which Elliot delivers by ice cream van; as an audience member you spend much of the play working out exactly what the ‘party’ for which so much preparation is being made will actually entail (another similarity with The Fastest Clock in the Universe). This, clearly, is an environment of desensitization writ large – one where torture and assassination give Darren sexual pleasure, where her new mate Nas’s reminisces of her family lead blandly into recollecting witnessing their deaths from a supermarket cereal aisle.

To a certain extent there’s only so far you can take such piano-wire verbal tension though, and for me there was a point about 2/3rds of the way through where we had one too many characters onstage with a penchant for shouting at the rest in a vain attempt to assert control. Such a constantly high volume threw those performances into relief that didn’t resort to such techniques – Elliot’s transvestite girlfriend Lola (played wonderfully by the nevertheless slightly too well-spoken Cassian Bilton), or their sinisterly camp city boy client (Charlie MacVicar). And the violence which inevitably closes the play is disappointingly lurching in intensity, albeit with some wonderful sound design that’ll leave Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ ringing in your ears in all the wrong ways. To the credit of the playwright and the production however, the play doesn’t rest at simply being violent – and in examining its repercussions provides an ending that is startlingly, wonderfully intense. It shocks a lot

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