Mercury Fur
Mercury Fur is a play written by Philip Ridley which premiered in 2005. It is Ridley's fifth adult stage play and premiered at the Plymouth Theatre Royal, before moving to the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.
Set against the backdrop of a dystopian London, the narrative focuses on a party at which the torture and murder of a child is the main entertainment.
The original production was directed by John Tiffany as part of the This Other England season of new writing by Paines Plough and Theatre Royal, Plymouth in England. The part of Elliot was played by Ben Whishaw, who had achieved fame the previous year for, at the age of only 23, portraying Hamlet in Trevor Nunn's production at the Old Vic Theatre in London, for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Actor.
The play is particularly noted for being the subject of controversy: Ridley's publisher, Faber and Faber, refused to publish the script and the original production received regular walkouts from audience members along with a generally divided and sometimes hostile response from critics. Over time, Mercury Fur has generally attracted a much more positive reception, with some critics even hailing the play as a "masterpiece".
The play is the first entry in Ridley's unofficially titled "Brothers Trilogy", being followed by Leaves of Glass and Piranha Heights.
Ridley dedicated the play to his agent Rod Hall, who was murdered in May 2004, several months before the play's premiere. According to Ridley, the dedication was not originally intended as a response to Hall's death as it had already been planned some time prior to when Hall was killed.
Story
Mercury Fur is set in a post-apocalyptic version of London's East End, where gang violence and drugs - in the form of hallucinogenic butterflies - terrorize the community. The protagonists are a gang of youths surviving by their wits. They deal the butterflies, selling them to their addicted customers from locations such as the now burnt-out British Museum. Their main source of income, however, is holding parties for wealthy clients in which their wildest, most amoral fantasies are brought to life.The play, during nearly two uninterrupted hours, centres on a party which revolves around the sadistic murder of a child, enacted according to the whims of a guest. The gang ultimately has to face the question of how far they are willing to go to save the people they love.
Characters
Elliot - Aged 19, he is the main facilitator in preparing the parties as well as being the chief dealer in butterflies which he sells in an ice cream van. He however has only ever taken one, meaning he has retained all his memories from before the butterflies arrived. He hurls a great deal of verbal abuse at Darren but also shows genuine love for him.Darren - Aged 16, he is Elliot's brother and assistant. He is addicted to the butterflies which have resulted in him having memory loss.
Naz - A young looking 15-year-old orphan who is a regular customer of Elliot's. He like many of the other characters has severe memory loss through butterfly addiction. He happens across the party by accident and wants to help the gang, much to the dismay of Elliot.
Party Piece - A ten-year-old Pakistani boy. He is the victim prepared for the Party Guest.
Lola - A 19-year-old transgender woman. Lola is skilled in designing costumes and make-up, which she makes for the parties.
Spinx - 21 years old, he is the leader of the gang and Lola's brother. He looks after the Duchess with whom it is suggested he has an intimate relationship with. The rest of the gang are mostly fearful of him.
Duchess - A frail and blind 38-year-old woman. She gets her name from having been led to think that she is a duchess of a country, which she believes due to not being able to see. She has also mixed up her life history with the character of Maria from The Sound of Music. It is heavily suggested that she may have a closer connection to Elliot and Darren than it appears.
Party Guest - 23 years old. The party revolves around his fantasy where he is a soldier in the Vietnam War who, for his own sexual gratification, tortures with a meat hook a child Pakistani version of Elvis Presley, singing Love Me Tender in a gold two-piece suit.
Response and legacy
Initial reception and controversy
The play became a theatrical cause célèbre when it premiered, with at least 10 walkouts reported each night of the show's original run, and even Ridley's publishers of ten years, Faber and Faber, refusing to publish the text.Critical response was almost as fevered as the events on stage with Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph describing the play as "a poisonous piece" as well as declaring that everyone concerned with the production had been "degraded" and, more controversially, that Ridley was "turned on by his own sick fantasies."
However, there was also critical support for the play, with John Peter drama critic of The Sunday Times, urging people to see it: "It is a play you need to see for its diagnosis of a terror-stricken and belligerent civilization. I recommend it strongly to the strong in heart."
Accordingly, the play set critics at odds with each other, with Guardian front liner Michael Billington insisting that the portrayed "social breakdown... flies in the face of a mass of evidence one could produce to the contrary", whilst Lyn Gardner and Miranda Sawyer joined the ranks of those siding with the lyricism of the piece.
In defending the production, director John Tiffany explained that although the play is full of "incredibly shocking images and stories, almost all the violence happens off stage. It is almost Greek in its ambition" and that the play is "the product of a diseased world, not a diseased mind".
Responding to the critical backlash, Ridley described the critics as "blinder than a bagful of moles in a coal cellar", a comment partially made in reference to him witnessing the critic Charles Spencer fall over furniture onstage while trying to find his seat on the play's press night.
In defending the play, Ridley expressed what he felt were double standards within the theatrical establishment, in that it is acceptable for there to be scenes of violence in classical drama but not within contemporary plays:
"Why is it that it is fine for the classic plays to discuss - even show - these things, but people are outraged when contemporary playwrights do it? If you go to see King Lear, you see a man having his eyes pulled out; in Medea, a woman slaughters her own children. The recent revival of Iphigenia at the National was acclaimed for its relevance. But when you try to write about the world around us, people get upset. If I'd wrapped Mercury Fur up as a recently rediscovered Greek tragedy it would be seen as an interesting moral debate like Iphigenia, but because it is set on an east-London housing estate it is seen as being too dangerous to talk about. What does that say about the world we live in? What does it say about theatre today?"
Ridley also explained that he felt critics had disliked Mercury Fur because of its subject matter and not for the theatrical experience the play is trying to create for its audience:
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with people being disturbed within the theatre at all… I think theatre is fifteen years behind any other art form… It’s still perceived as a kind of subject matter based art form. You wouldn’t go along and look at a Suzanne painting and criticize it just on the choice of apples she’s chosen to paint, you’d criticize it, and you’d judge it and experience it for the use of paint… Because we come from a basic literal tradition we still view stage plays as kind of glorified novels and we judge them purely on their subject matter, regardless of the theatrical experience of sitting there and watching the play.”
Ridley also defended the depiction of violence within the story, arguing that is used for a moral purpose and that the play is more about love than violence:
"The things that happen in Mercury Fur are not gratuitous, they are heart-breaking. The people may do terrible things but everything they do is out of love, in an attempt to keep each other safe. The play is me asking, 'What would I do in that position?' If you knew that to keep your mother, brother and lover safe, you would have to do terrible things, would you still do them? That's the dilemma of the play. It asks us all, 'What lengths would you go to to save the people you love?'"
Despite this controversy – or perhaps because of it – the play sold out on its initial run and, by the end, was playing to an enthusiastic young audience.
2010 police incident
In 2010 police almost raided Theatre Delicatessen's production of the play when a resident living next door believed the play's violent scenes were being carried out for real. Actors waiting offstage along with the company's producer intervened before the police would have stopped the performance.Behind the Eyes
In February 2011 the play was used by the Schema Arts Collective as the basis for a community arts project called Behind the Eyes, which took place at the Sassoon Gallery, London.The project featured an amateur production of Mercury Fur which was cut down to 40 minutes and used actors from the local area. The performance was particular in its use of sound design with edited audio recordings of the actors and gallery environment incorporated into the production.
The project also featured a thirty-minute documentary film Mercury Fur Unveiled about the cast and creative team's process of realising the project and their views on the play. The documentary was later broadcast on the Community Channel in 2013 and is .
Behind the Eyes also displayed artwork inspired by the play with a large mural of a shark and Ridley himself collaborated by exhibiting a series of photographic portraits he had created of the cast.
Critical reappraisal
In 2012 the play was arguably critically reassessed when revived by The Greenhouse Theatre Company, with the production receiving extremely positive reviews and even marketed as "Ridley’s Masterpiece", a statement which was also made by critic Aleks Sierz and A Younger Theatre reviewer Jack Orr.The play also drew attention for its relevance in the aftermath of the 2011 England Riots with the production's online trailer using dialogue from the play over footage from the riots.
New monologues
For the 2012 production, Ridley wrote four individual new monologues for the characters Elliot, Naz, Lola and Darren which were filmed and put on The Greenhouse Theatre Company's YouTube channel to promote the play transferring to the West End.Legacy and influence
The play has been produced globally in numerous productions, having achieved a cult following, with theatre-makers keen to retell its story and audiences curious to see the story being told.On seeing the original production, dramaturg and theatre director Lisa Goldman described the play as "one of the greatest theatre experiences of my life" which led to her commissioning and directing Ridley's next two plays Leaves of Glass and Piranha Heights.
Mark Ravenhill named Mercury Fur as "the best play" he had seen in 2005.
The playwright Lou Ramsden has described the play as a major influence on her work, stating that "nothing changed my theatrical outlook quite like first production of Mercury Fur at the Menier Chocolate factory… It showed me that I could do more than just picture a stage – I could use the circumstances of the theatre as well. The fact that the audience were in an inescapable black box served to ramp up the tension of the play, to unbearable levels... My heart literally pounded. I was thrilled by the revelation that theatre could be more than just an exercise in language, or a nice, polite, passively watched story – it could elicit a physical reaction, giving people a horrifyingly visceral roller-coaster ride." Ramsden has cited how this experience of hers informed the writing of her 2010 play Breed and her 2011 play Hundreds and Thousands.
Ridley has described Mercury Fur as a turning point in his career as a playwright: "After Mercury Fur, the work reinvented itself. It was as if people saw for the first time. A whole new generation of younger directors came along – and they all just got it. In the past, I had to go into rehearsals and explain what I was doing. Then it was as if somebody flicked a switch and suddenly that changed."
Plays that critics believe have been influenced by or bear homage to Mercury Fur include:
- Motortown by Simon Stephens
- Hotel by Polly Stenham
- The Wolf from the Door by Rory Mullarkey
Productions
| Country | Year | Location | People | Details |
| England | 2005 | Drum Theatre, Plymouth. Later transferred to the Menier Chocolate Factory, London. | Company: Paines Plough. Director: John Tiffany. Cast: Ben Whishaw, Robert Boulter, Shane Zaza, Neet Mohan, Harry Kent, Fraser Ayres, Sophie Stanton, Dominic Hall. In the London production Party Piece was played by Prem and Previ Gami. | World Premiere 10 - 26 February 2005 in Plymouth. London Premiere 2 - 27 March 2005 in London. |
| Italy | 2006 2007 | Teatro Belli, Rome. | Company: Trilly Productions in collaboration with Diritto & Rovescio. Translator: Italian translation by Fabiana Formica. Director: :it:Carlo Emilio Lerici|Carlo Emilio Lerici. Cast: Michele Maganza, Mauro Conte, Michele Degirolamo, Stefano Colelli, Davide Gagliardini, Andrea Redavid, Nunzia Di Somma, Fabrizio Bordignon. | Opened in April 2006. November 2006. 15 - 26 May 2007 |
| USA | 2007 | Rude Guerilla Theater, Santa Ana. | Company: Rude Guerrilla Theater Company. Director: Dave Barton. Cast: Scott Barber, Justin Radford, Peter Hagen, Ethan Tryon-Vincent, Alexander Price, Elsa Martinez Phillips, Ryan Harris, Robert Dean Nunez. | US Premiere 2 - 27 March 2007. |
| USA | 2007 | The Peter Jones Gallery, Chicago. | Company: The Broken Compass. Director: Greg Beam. Cast included: James Errico, Brian Kilborn, Casey Chapman, Katlyn Carlson. | American Midwest Premiere 12 April – 19 May 2007. |
| Australia | 2007 | Theatreworks, Melbourne. Later transferred to SBW Stables Theatre, Sydney. | Company: Little Death Productions. Director: Ben Packer. Cast: Luke Mullins, Xavier Samuel, Aaron Orzech, Wazzadeeno Wharton-Thomas, Russ Pirie, Gareth Ellis, Fiona Macys-Marzo, Paul Ashcroft. | Australian Premiere 30 August – 16 September 2007 in Melbourne. 27 September - 13 October 2007 in Sydney as part of Griffin Theatre Company's 2007 Stablemates season. |
| Turkey | 2008 | Istanbul | Company: DOT. Translator: Cem Kurtuluş. Director: Murat Daltaban. | Opened on 18 October 2007 |
| Malta | 2008 | MITP Theatre, Valletta. | Company: Unifaun Theatre Productions. Director: Chris Gatt. Cast included: Irene Christ, Chris Galea, Mikhail Pisani, Edward Caruana Galizia, Barrie Stott, Jan Zammit, Toni Attard, Francis Nwobodo | 1–10 February 2008 |
| USA | 2009 | The Imagined Life Theater, Los Angeles. | Company: Needtheatre. Director: Dado. Cast: Edward Tournier, Andrew Perez, Jason Karasev, Ryan Hodge, Jeff Torres, Greg Beam, Nina Sallinen, Kelly Van Kirk. | LA Premiere 29 May - 28 June 2009. Ovation Awards Nominee:
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| England | 2010 | Picton Place, London. | Company: Theatre Delicatessen. Director: Frances Loy. Cast: Matt Granados, Chris Urch, Mikey Barj, Suraj Rattu, Jack Sweeney, Isaac Jones, Debra Baker, Ben Wigzell, Tom Vickers. | The first major London revival 9 February - 13 March 2010. Site-specific production staged in a disused office block. |
| USA | 2010 | , New York City. | Director: Cast included: Santiago Aguirre, Clio Davies, Claudia De Latour, Vienna Hall, Roland Lane, Ben Mann, Emily Seale-Jones, Saffron Wayman. | 29 March 2010. |
| USA | 2011 | The Ringwald Theater, Michigan. | Company: Who Wants Cake? Theatre. Director: Joe Plambeck. Cast: Jon Ager, Nico Ager, Alex D. Hill, Scott Wilding, Vince Kelley, Patrick O'Connor Cronin, Cassandra McCarthy, David Legato. | Michigan Premiere 2 – 25 April 2011. 2011 Wilde Award Winners:
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| USA | 2012 | , Colorado Springs | Directed by Irene Hessner | 24th February - 11th March 2012. |
| England | 2012 | The Old Red Lion Theatre, London. Later transferred to the West End at Trafalgar Studios, London. | Company: Greenhouse Theatre Company. Director: Ned Bennet. Cast: Ciarán Owens, Frank C. Keogh, Olly Alexander, Ronak Raj, James Fynan, Ben Dilloway, Katie Scarfe, Henry Lewis. For the production's run at Trafalgar Studios the role of Naz was played by Sam Swann | The Second Major London Revival 27 March - 14 April 2012.Off West End Award Winner:
29 May - 23 June 2012 |
| USA | 2012 | Atlantic Stage 2 Theater, New York City | Company: Blue Ass Monkey Theater Company and Atlantic Acting School Director: Hannah Pascoe. Cast included: Michael Cirelli, Lucy Freeman, John Anthony Gorman, Luka Mijatovic, Dan Mulkerin, Arturo Prato, Estefanía Quijada and Bake Williams. | Performed 14th and 15th December 2012. |
| Canada | 2014 | Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto | Seven Siblings Theatre Company. Canadian Premiere | Produced in August 2014 |
| USA | 2014 | Under St. Marks Theater, New York City | Savage Detectives Theatre Company and Just a Gentleman Productions. Directed by Guillermo Logar; Cast includes Peter John Wallace, John Anthony Gorman, Rafael Albarran, Franco Pedicini, Enrique Huili, Nic Westwood, Valentina Corbella and Joseph Huffman. Stage Manager: Charles Furst. | Opened 13 November 2014 |
| Japan | 2015 | Theatre Tram in Tokyo, Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Hyogo and Canal City theater in Fukuoka | Directed by Akira Shirai. Starring Issei Takahashi as Elliot and Koji Seto as Darren. | Produced as Japan Tour in February–March, 2015 |
| USA | 2015 | BrainSpunk Theater, Philadelphia | Philadelphia Premiere, Directed by Josh Hitchens. Starring Joshua McLucas as Elliot and Samuel Fineman as Darren. | Produced July - August 2015 |
| USA | 2015 | The New Group, New York City | Off-Broadway Premiere, Directed by Scott Elliott starring Jack DiFalco as "Darren," Tony Revolori as "Naz," and Zane Pais as "Elliot", Paul Iacono as Lola | Opened 5 August 2015 |
| England | 2015 | Middle Child, Hull | Directed by Paul Smith; Cast included Joshua Mayes Cooper, Laurie Jamieson, Edward Cole, Nima Taleghani, Laurence North, Madeleine MacMahon, James Stanyer and Charlie Thompson. | 10th Anniversary production. 14–24 October 2015 in a site-specific production at Lowgate Centre, Hull. Supported by the Hull UK City of Culture 2017. |
| England | 2018 | Milton Court Studio Theatre, London Barbican | Directed by John Haidar; Cast included Mirren Mack and Joseph Potter. Designed by Frankie Bradshaw, Lighting design by Liam Strong and sound design by Dan Barnicott. | Performed by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. |
| Australia | 2019 | Kings Cross Theatre - KXT | Producers: Jens Radda, Daniel Ball, Kim Hardwick, Martin Kinnane Director: Kim Hardwick Associate Director: Danielle Maas Assistant Director: Jens Radda Cast: Danny Ball, Meg Clarke, Jack Walton, Michael McStay, Janet Anderson, Romy Bartz, Joshua McElroy , Lucia May | 24 May - 08 June, 2019 Presented by Hasemann, Ball & Radda and White Box Theatre in Association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre |