Review: Mercury Fur

Did grandeur pay off for Mercury Fur?


‘There’s millions of planets to choose from, El.’ So says Darren (Tommy Rowe) to his big brother Elliot (Sebastian Carrington-Howell), and so sums up the message of Mercury Fur: there are millions of possibilities for the future of our society, and not all of them are rosy. It’s a weighty question the play isn’t afraid to throw in people’s faces, and the audience was left wondering what we’d do if we survived the end of the world.

Mercury Fur is about the monsters in the back of our minds. It excelled in its macabre grittiness, not so much a play as a series of jarring dissections on what would happen if society ever decided to obliterate itself. The play effectively began weeks ago, with a build-up of news clips of spreading riots, culminating in a preview a week before the show where we were introduced to the characters and their post-riot lives. On the way to the show we were given cryptic butterflies and driven to an undisclosed ‘safe’ location away from the riots.  Once there, a huddle of dazed and affronted people began questioning us – where was Elliot? What did we want? And most pressingly, did we have any butterflies?

It was a slick and promising prelude to the main event. The play itself took place inside a nondescript abandoned building, with debris strewn over the floor and haphazardly arranged mismatched seating. Director Jocelyn Cox and her team had chosen what seemed the perfect space to encapsulate the desolate, unforgiving London of the possible future. And yet, as soon as the action began, the cracks began to seep in.

The main issue was with being able to hear the actors. Rowe’s dazed and subdued performance exquisitely captured Darren’s vulnerability, but was lost in the vastness of the venue. Similarly, Carrington-Howell’s feisty, gritty Elliot provided the perfect foil but his voice was swallowed by the unforgiving acoustics. It was a bold and undeniably commendable choice to pursue site-specific theatre, but I left wanting to see how it would’ve fared in the Barron or Venue 1. In all honesty, I don’t see what would’ve been lost. The heart of the play isn’t in how desolate the set looks or how apprehensive you make the audience feel. It lies in the two brothers caught in the centre of a London gone horrendously awry, and you don’t need anything flashy for that. Theatre is as much emotion as it is spectacle and, in over pushing the second, I lost sight of the first.

The only relief from the gritty new dystopia playing out in front of us is the darkest form of comedy. We laugh because we have to. We find Naz’s (Frazer Hadfield) woefully misplaced cheeriness funny because the only other option is facing up to a truth we are afraid to admit. We smirk at Ayanna Coleman’s chillingly unhinged Duchess because we’re scared of what else to do. The society of this post-apocalyptic world is monstrous and malign, and forces us to dance on the edge of the realisation that we are capable of far more gruesome things than we care to admit. The production unquestionably excelled on this front. I laughed. I immediately felt guilty for doing so. I wondered what ultimate alarming truth there was in me doing so.

It was a promising production that fell short of spectacular. The performances were testament to the overwhelming dedication and talent of all involved. Particularly outstanding was Frazer Hadfield’s eager, affable Naz, the perfect counterpoint to the nauseating amorality pervading the climax of the play; equally, Ku Boane’s Lola offered a refreshingly frightened portrayal of someone caught up in the most terrible of webs. Spinx (Joseph Cunningham), and the maniacal, sadistic Party Guest (Oli Clayton) occasionally played off one-sided, but that can perhaps be put down to the distorted moral integrity and sadism of this new world.

I left in awe, because I was meant to. And then I started to reflect. It ultimately became a spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Was it admirably executed? Yes. Was it an exciting venture for student theatre here? Yes. Did the ambition of the play hamper the production? Ultimately, yes.