The Hammerstone Book

I thought that The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh was the most f*cked up play I'd ever seen/read, but Mercury Fur narrowly edges it out. It is inventive and brave; there are few modern plays that dare to be this grotesque on purpose (but not gratuitously so). Ridley's own description of his work really reveals the sentimental themes that underpin all the terrible stuff that goes on at the surface.

"It is a play about love. About what we do for love and what happens if there is a lack of love. I was interested in what happens to a society if we lose our memories and language disintegrates. One of the things that separates us from the animals is our ability to tell stories and to impose narrative on our lives. Part of the way society is held together is by a continuum of stories. I wanted to explore what happens when we are all robbed of our personal narratives." (The Guardian, 2005).

As for the title, which, tellingly, I have found not a whisper about in any review of this work (critics always pretend things they don't understand don't exist): I personally understand this to be a reference to mercury poisoning, which can cause dementia and loss of memory, feelings of spaciness and disorientation, and even in rare cases, addiction. Back in the day, mercury compounds were used to separate animal fur from the pelts to make hats and clothes. The phrase "mad as a hatter" comes from the experience of people who made these clothes. They would over time get horribly sick and crazy from the heavy metal exposure. So, though it is never explicitly stated, perhaps the "butterflies" that everyone keeps taking are a highly addictive form of mercury - like the toxic mercury fur hatters had to work with.

There are clever allusions to Mercury in its different conceptual forms throughout the play, too. Space exploration is presented as an escape to the characters, for instance; they fantasize about leaving this planet to a new one, any one, which might hold a better life than the currently inhabited eschaton. Also, Mercury the Roman deity lead souls to the underworld. And there's the linguistic oddity of the phrase "Mercury Fur" in itself, which doesn't have an immediate conceptual referent in the English language. The audience constantly returns to it, turning it over mentally, much like the cast of addled teenagers constantly try returning to their pre-apocalypse memories, losing and gaining the ideas and the words to describe them in a tragically haphazard way.

Anyway. I loved this play. It was brutal and not for the squeamish. Wish it was more translatable to US audiences; I doubt I'll ever get to see it performed here.