The stuff nightmares are made of

Wagner's gods have long disappeared into their eternal twilight taking with them the final vestiges of heroism and poetry that in other times and other worlds successfully disguised the ghastly panoply of war. After Siegfried's funeral pyre burned Valhalla, the river Rhine overflowed its banks. War was over and the serene strains of Wagner's Rhine Music brought Gotterdammerung, and War, to a close. Or so we thought. The Great War broke out setting the tone for the 20th century. It ushered in the bloodiest century mankind had experienced as yet as 9/11 did in our own present sad and tortured one; the 21st, with its cynically waged and deadly war in Iraq. Because of the way we are we tend to gloss over the ugly side of war which unleashes the devils in us all, we tend to believe the propaganda about kind soldiers with flowers in their helmets playing with children and distributing chocolate and dismiss the many aberrations and atrocities that also happen, inevitably and always by these same soldiers in hell-holes like Guantanamo Bay.

Mercury Fur may be allegorical but it is real. Philip Ridley, choosing as the enemy's deadliest weapon, a butterfly, the symbol of Love, rent to bits yet another myth just as effectively as Wagner. I can never now look at Canova's Cupid and Psyche with the ethereal marble butterfly cupped in her hand in quite the same way again. Butterflies that if ingested induce hallucinations and complete and utter mayhem in which fathers slaughter children and the same children gang rape others, supermarkets are knee deep in blood and limbs are hacked from torsos; a ghoulish phantasmagoria conjured up by the painfully eked out memories of the characters in Mr Ridley's play that had my brain writhing and squirming in a torment of indecision all night about how I was going to write this crit! It is a tribute to Mr Ridley's artistic bent for he is also an artist that his imagery comes across so vividly in his prose.

Not all artists can wield the pen and the brush with equal dexterity as this rebel Eastender, who portrays both visually and in prose the very dark and seamy side of our lives which if we look closely is not so far removed from our comfort zones as we think.

Like a crazed ballerina spinning on tiptoe; faster and faster, the action of the play escalates towards "the party" in which a soldier played by a brash and frighteningly vital Jan Zammit has paid, and heavily too, to get his sexually charged revenge on an informer who he insists is a young black performer dressed as a wannabe Elvis; "the party piece" played sleepily by young Francis Nwobodo. When "the party piece" dies before the soldier can get any reaction out of him, Spinks, the ruthless boss replaces the "party piece" with Naze played by Barrie Stott. The soldier is so worked up into a sexually charged frenzy that he agrees and starts to beat Naze with a meat hook. This is too much for Darren, played by Mike Pisani, who shoots the soldier. From there the action finally resolves and a pale ray of hope appears in an otherwise black scenario that resolves in the final air-raid, the one to end all air-raids.

That's the action part. The more important aspect of the play is the psychological one. Elliot, played by Chris Galea, is the lynchpin of the entire action, both physical and psychological. It is he alone who is not dependant on a diet of butterflies to blank out the horrors around him, and, more significantly, in his memory. Despite his ranting and raving he genuinely loves his vulnerable kid brother Darren and also loves Lola who is Spinks's younger transvestite brother, played amazingly by Edward Caruana Galizia. Elliot is a truly rounded and developed character whom Mr Galea plays with passion and conviction. I was riveted by his performance throughout.

I have absolutely nothing but praise for the entire cast, Naze played sensitively by Barrie Stott, the duchess played with great pathos by Irene Christ, I will never forget her singing the Brahms Lullaby in its original German with the "party piece" on her lap, and Spinks, the villain of the play whom we discover is not as dreadful as we thought, played convincingly by Toni Attard who managed to lose the iron control he had over the others and yet retain a mysterious dignity when he carried Naze's lacerated body offstage.

We discover that what we were seeing and experiencing was the human flotsam and jetsam of a disaster, a catastrophe of cataclysmic proportions. One in which the British Museum, the symbol of civilisation has been smashed and looted. Elliot is the only one who is fully aware of this which is why he carries the play single-handed like a thespian Atlas.

What is so improbable but so real about Mercury Fur is no matter how disturbed we were by what was going on, no matter how deep into moral and psychological depravity we sank along with the characters, they all, with the exception of the soldier, were redeemed. We find out that Spinks had made a deal with the soldier to save the rest from the imminent deadly bombing raid and invasion. Darren; poor little weak Darren, shoots the soldier to save Naze. Elliot was ready to sacrifice Naze to save Lola and Darren and as for Spinks himself, his patience with the blind and epileptic duchess showed that he was not altogether the tough gangster he was made out to be. En passant, when the flashbacks are pieced together, we are given to understand that Elliot and Darren are the duchess's sons and the role of Spinks and his brother Lola are called into question. A strange and twisted post-cataclysm family in which the outsiders, Naze and the soldier, are sacrificed in order to save the weird family nucleus of which they are not fully aware of themselves.

This is not a comfortable play to watch; far from it. Because it deals with what is potentially true and what we tend to ignore on our TV screens day in and day out our otherwise tough-skinned bubbles of contentment are assailed big time. Chris Gatt and Adrian Buckle have done a marvellous job on this play which depressed and elated me at the same time. Mr Gatt for directing the play so convincingly as to pull us down into an abyss of a world which we can only imagine in our worst nightmares and Mr Buckle for producing a play that despite its utter blackness is redeemed, if momentarily, by that indestructible human feeling called Love before all is destroyed forever; butterflies and all.