June 18, 2008
When my friends and I noticed that the members of the audience were being given flashlights and taken down into the darkened Hertford Bop Cellar in small groups, we decided that we were probably all going to be killed and eaten. Our brief, accidental trip down the cement stairs to look for the ticket booth had done nothing to assuage any such fears: the cellar was tiny, airless, and filthy.
As it turned out, both the filth and the ineffable sense of menace suited the play we were about to see very well. Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur is a play that leaves one with an uneasy awareness of human nature – not the simple conclusion that people are inherently bad, but that their goodness and badness are often inextricable, extreme, and closer to each other than is comfortable.
The play deals with a pair of brothers living in an unspecified future dystopia, making a living by dealing hallucinogenic drugs called 'butterflies' and organizing parties in which the rich can fulfill any fantasy, no matter how foul or perverse. As the play begins, they are cleaning an apartment with an eye to hosting an especially gruesome party, which seems to involve a very ill young boy.
There unfolds a play that is all the more graphic because more of its horrors are heard than seen. One of the most affecting and uncomfortable moments comes when a character strung out on butterflies recalls the rape and murder of his sister in a grocery shop with a terrible, lucid vividness. The audience, seated in the round and on a level with the actors, hardly knew where to look; before I decided on the floor, I exchanged several glances with people who, like me, seemed to be on the verge of tears. The script continually treads the line between self-indulgent grotesquerie and true horror, and in largely staying on the right side it becomes even more striking.
It is in a large part through the efforts of the actors that this production works so well. Mercury Fur was without question one of the best-acted shows I've seen in Oxford. The acting dealt in a sort of magic realism: the characters were all utterly believable as people, but ever-so-slightly skewed. The effect was uncanny, and a perfect evocation of an unimaginable future.
As it turned out, both the filth and the ineffable sense of menace suited the play we were about to see very well. Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur is a play that leaves one with an uneasy awareness of human nature – not the simple conclusion that people are inherently bad, but that their goodness and badness are often inextricable, extreme, and closer to each other than is comfortable.
The play deals with a pair of brothers living in an unspecified future dystopia, making a living by dealing hallucinogenic drugs called 'butterflies' and organizing parties in which the rich can fulfill any fantasy, no matter how foul or perverse. As the play begins, they are cleaning an apartment with an eye to hosting an especially gruesome party, which seems to involve a very ill young boy.
There unfolds a play that is all the more graphic because more of its horrors are heard than seen. One of the most affecting and uncomfortable moments comes when a character strung out on butterflies recalls the rape and murder of his sister in a grocery shop with a terrible, lucid vividness. The audience, seated in the round and on a level with the actors, hardly knew where to look; before I decided on the floor, I exchanged several glances with people who, like me, seemed to be on the verge of tears. The script continually treads the line between self-indulgent grotesquerie and true horror, and in largely staying on the right side it becomes even more striking.
It is in a large part through the efforts of the actors that this production works so well. Mercury Fur was without question one of the best-acted shows I've seen in Oxford. The acting dealt in a sort of magic realism: the characters were all utterly believable as people, but ever-so-slightly skewed. The effect was uncanny, and a perfect evocation of an unimaginable future.