. . Almost Utopian'
Mercury Fur is a terrifying glimpse into the possible future
By Joel Beers
Thursday, March 1, 2007 - 3:00 pm

One of the least-horrific stories in Philip Ridley’s atrocity-laden Mercury Fur deals with the Greek myth of the Minotaur. After hearing the tale of the slaying of the half-bull, half-human lord of the labyrinth, one of the play’s ubiquitous drug-addled teen-agers wants to know: Was the creature’s head man or animal?

The kid is trying to determine innocence or guilt. If the head were bullish, he suggests, the Minotaur deserved death, since its beastly nature dominated. But if the head were human, the monster was no monster—but instead merely a man who could be forgiven for possessing beastly tendencies.

Mercury Fur begs a similar question about itself: how much humanity does it possess, and is there enough to justify its relentless litany of nightmares?

Even by the Rude Guerrilla’s Theatre Company’s uncompromisingly visceral sensibilities, Mercury Fur is dark, brutal and twisted. A story about kids shooting caged monkeys is downright innocuous next to that of a young boy in a supermarket witnessing his mother’s decapitation and sister’s gang-rape . . . or a father taking a hammer to his wife or children . . . or what a hallucinated Jacqueline Kennedy does when she feels her dead husband’s brain matter oozing between her thighs—all of which pales before the part of the play that is truly revolting: the on-stage mutilation of a real, live 10-year-old child.

Yet ask Ridley about the gruesome images and the nihilistic pallor that hovers over every character, and the British-born writer (whose work includes the screenplay for the 1990 film The Krays) talks about love.

“I think of Mercury Fur almost as a romance,” Ridley replies via e-mail from England, where he is immersed in his latest play. “The play is blazingly optimistic. It is about the survival of love. In the light of what we’re seeing on our news every day it’s almost Utopian.”

This almost-Utopia visualizes a not-too-distant America where chaos reigns and most everyone under the age of 25 seems addicted to a strange drug called butterflies. It begins with two brothers breaking into a dilapidated apartment searching for a place to film a torture, and ends with the U.S. government bombing its own people. Calling this a Utopia seems as far-fetched as describing the transport of German Jews to concentration camps as a state-paid vacation.

Through all the horror, however, Mercury Fur poses an alternative to despair and destruction—and it is here that Ridley’s claim of optimism just might earn a little credibility. If a heart does beat in this play, it seems infused by Ridley’s desire to show a different route for a post-MTV generation that he sees as out of hope, and increasingly out of options.

“I am angry and distressed for a whole generation of young people who seem to be fueled by apathy,” Ridley writes in his e-mail. “Who have no empathy. Who are too disconnected to even be angry. Who have no sense of history. Who revel in ignorance. Who delight in oblivion. Who find fulfillment in being totally unengaged. Mercury Fur is a scream in the face of this. It is a shriek of defiance against the approaching abyss.”

Dave Barton, who is directing the Rude Guerilla presentation of the play, appreciates the dilemma that Ridley is trying to confront.

“For me the play asks tough ethical questions,” says Barton, who is an OCWeekly contributor. “Under horrifying circumstances—think modern-day Baghdad transplanted to Orange County, for example—do we go The Lord of the Flies route or do we eventually stop and say ‘No more?’ What if your family or loved ones needed to be protected and it required you to do something horrible? Would you do it? Or would you let your family suffer?”

As coarse and savage as its words and events, the language of Mercury Fur has a perverse sort of beauty. Rarely do characters so far outside the margins of conventional society sound so lyrical, even when their words are used as weapons of destruction. Consider this interestingly worded insult: “You’ve been acting like a kitten after a twirl in the microwave all afternoon, and this microwaved feline behavior is eating up time faster than a starving piranha on a freshly-aborted fetus. Do I make myself fucking clear?”

The play is also wickedly funny, quite an achievement in one so disturbing. When a slightly less-than-college-educated character recounts the history of the 20th century, it comes out a jumbled mess in which John F. Kennedy is married to Marilyn Monroe and bombards Germany with napalm and nukes after Hitler threatens to sodomize her.

The language and the humor suggest that Ridley is concerned with more than shocking or disgusting his audience. He confirms that suspicion.

“W.H. Auden wrote, ‘We must love each other or die,’” Ridley writes in his e-mail. “In many ways, that’s exactly what (the play) is saying. We must tell stories of love or we will forget how to love. Love is a ritual than can be forgotten, like all others.”

MERCURY FUR, AT RUDE GUERILLA THEATER, 200 N. BROADWAY, SANTA ANA, (714) 547-4688; WWW.RUDEGUERILLA.ORG. FRI.-SAT., 8 P.M.; SUN., 2 P.M.; ALSO THURS., MAR. 15, 8 P.M. THROUGH MAR. 24. $10-$18.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
'Mercury Fur' comes stateside
Rude Guerrilla will stage the U.S. premiere of Philip Ridley's controversial
play.
By ERIC MARCHESE
Special to the Register

If Britain's Philip Ridley is one of the few playwrights who could write
"Mercury Fur," which depicts a dark, post-apocalyptic world wherein teenagers
and young adults are forced to commit atrocities simply to survive, then Rude
Guerrilla Theater Company is likely one of the few U.S. theater troupes willing
to stage it.
Before its London opening, Ridley's 2005 drama garnered essentially
unjustified reaction based on advance buzz within the critical community and because
Ridley's longtime publisher had rejected the script as potentially too
offensive.
Santa Ana-based Rude G, which gives "Mercury Fur" its U.S. premiere Friday,
has a long record of staging national, West Coast and Orange County premieres
by the likes of Ridley's fellow Brits Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and other
"in-your-face" playwrights, so named for tackling controversial subjects,
albeit with a high degree of social consciousness.
Theater purists should find that, like so much classical Greek tragedy, much
of the violence in "Mercury Fur" is only suggested or occurs offstage. The
play also echoes the sense of menace within seemingly everyday characters and
scenarios found in the works of Harold Pinter.
It was a sensitive element of the plot, though – best left unrevealed – that
revolves around the presence of a 10-year-old boy that soured Faber and
Faber, publisher of all of Ridley's previous plays.
In a phone interview from his home in London, Ridley said that when the play
finally did open, critical response was "outrage, which I don't say with glee
or pride."
"It was described as being the most shocking or distressing since Sarah
Kane's 'Blasted,' " Ridley said. His other plays have likewise been received in
England "with a mixture of horror and shock" – and belated "admiration," often
years later.
Set in a darkly violent future world, the play follows two teenage brothers
in their hasty efforts to prepare a party for an unseen host and special
guest. Only belatedly do we learn the true nature of, and the malicious intent
behind, the event. Adding to the story's potency is the youth of most of the
characters (only one is over 22) and their casual regard for human life.
Ridley said he has interwoven fact and urban myth into the script, including
his sense that much of today's youth is ignorant of world history and inured
to violence. "The extrapolation" of today's world into the events of "Mercury
Fur," he said, "is a very short one."
Although his first draft came long before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he
said, the play now has "deeper resonance because of press coverage" of the
war showing "how swiftly man can lose humanity toward man."
The multitalented Ridley also writes children's plays and is a novelist,
painter, screenwriter (of the 1991 film "The Krays") and film director ("The
Reflecting Skin," from his own screenplay). He notes that the sense of menace
his work often induces is "part of the landscape" of London's East End, which
also spawned Pinter.
Ridley said almost all of his adult stage plays, "Mercury Fur" included,
unfold in real time with no break, exploiting "what theater does best." Only the
art form of theater, he said, can take an audience "through a journey that
takes two hours with a bunch of characters who don't leave the stage."
Rude Guerrilla artistic director Dave Barton, the production's director, said
the first time he read the "Mercury Fur" script, it "hit me like a
steamroller." As a playwright, he said, Ridley is honest about what he sees – and, as
goes the adage, the truth hurts.
He said the play's vision of young people exhibiting "horrific behavior" has
prompted him to warn audiences of the play's "explicit and disturbing scenes"
– and yet, Barton said, Ridley uses one of his characters to "force the
issue to come back to the personal" from the abstract, because "once you put a
human face" to atrocities, "it's impossible for you to forget them."
With love as a catalyst, Barton said, the play "shows us the possibility of
change – even if it's only love that comes from the understanding that someone
else is a human being and not disposable trash."
"If anything," Ridley said, "it should be an exercise in reinvigorating
empathy."
Freelance writer Eric Marchese has covered entertainment for the Register
since 1984.