It is Ridley's fifth adult stage play and premiered at the Plymouth Theatre Royal, before moving to the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.

Set against the backdrop of a dystopian London, the narrative focuses on a party at which the torture and murder of a child is the main entertainment.

[1] The part of Elliot was played by Ben Whishaw, who during the previous year had achieved fame and an Olivier Award Nomination for Best Actor for his performance as Hamlet.

[16] Mercury Fur is set in a post-apocalyptic version of London's East End, where gang violence and drugs - in the form of hallucinogenic butterflies - terrorize the community.

The play, during nearly two uninterrupted hours, centres on a party which revolves around the sadistic murder of a child, enacted according to the whims of a guest.

Elliot - Aged 19, he is the main facilitator in preparing the parties as well as being the chief dealer in butterflies which he sells in an ice cream van.

This reasoning was felt to be somewhat ironic as Faber’s decision to refuse publication was relayed to Ridley by phone whilst he was watching footage on his TV of the Beslan school siege, which claimed the lives of over 330 children.

Matthew Sweet wrote that the play had content that "seemed little more than a questionable authorial indulgence - an exercise in exploitative camp" that reduced "the sensitivity of the audience until they began to find such images [of cruelty] ludicrous and tiresome".

[19] Charles Spencer was highly critical, describing Mercury Fur as "the most violent and upsetting new play" of the last ten years, adding that "It positively revels in imaginative nastiness" and condemning it as "a poisonous piece".

He underlines that brutality warps, suggests that love and morals persist, and is deliberately creating a nightmare scenario rife with allusions to actual world news.

The Independent's Paul Taylor wrote that "the play has the right to risk toying with being offensive to bring home just how morally unsettling this depraved, perverted-kicks world has become.

The Herald's Carole Woddis wrote that "Ridley’s upsetting portrayal is, I believe, an honourable response to the genocides in Rwanda and atrocities in Iraq".

"[23] However, Paul Taylor found that "the political context is too conveniently hazy",[22] and John Gross wrote that "any political arguments are lost amid the sadistic fantasies, kinky rituals, gruesome anecdotes and flights of science fiction",[27] with similar comments coming from Brian Logan: "whatever questions playwright Philip Ridley seeks to pose are drowned out by the shrieking and bloodshed".

Michael Billington was critical, stating that he distrusted the play "from its reactionary despair and assumption that we are all going to hell in a handcart" along with writing that it succumbed "to a fashionable nihilism" and that Ridley’s portrayal of social-breakdown "flies in the face of a mass of evidence one could produce to the contrary.

"[29] In contrast, Alastair Macaulay described the play as a "realistic nightmare" which portrayed "a kind of believable hell […] like the darkest parallel-universe version of the world we know".

[29][20][24][25] Some even went as far as to voice concern for the wellbeing for the young actor portraying The Party Piece[20][22] or thought that the play might make audience members vomit.

She went on to say that there would be no "room for every type of play in Britain" if critics "remain fuddy-duddies [and] continue to discourage new writing that they don't understand".

[34] In defending the production, director John Tiffany explained that although the play is full of "incredibly shocking images and stories, almost all the violence happens off stage.

These and other comments Ridley made about his critics were condemned as "impressively bilious" and "crassly malicious" by Theatre Record editor Ian Shuttleworth.

If I'd wrapped Mercury Fur up as a recently rediscovered Greek tragedy it would be seen as an interesting moral debate like Iphigenia, but because it is set on an east-London housing estate it is seen as being too dangerous to talk about.

"[4]Ridley also explained that he felt critics had disliked Mercury Fur because of its subject matter and not for the theatrical experience the play is trying to create for its audience: "I don’t think there is anything wrong with people being disturbed within the theatre at all… I think theatre is fifteen years behind any other art form… It’s still perceived as a kind of subject matter based art form.

You wouldn’t go along and look at a Suzanne painting and criticize it just on the choice of apples [s]he’s chosen to paint, you’d criticize it, and you’d judge it and experience it for the use of paint… Because we come from a basic literal tradition we still view stage plays as kind of glorified novels and we judge them purely on their subject matter, regardless of the theatrical experience of sitting there and watching the play.

Behind the Eyes also displayed artwork inspired by the play with a large mural of a shark (which was also utilised as the production's scenic backdrop) and Ridley himself collaborated by exhibiting a series of photographic portraits he had created of the cast.

[42] For the 2012 production, Ridley wrote four individual new monologues for the characters Elliot, Naz, Lola and Darren which were filmed and put on The Greenhouse Theatre Company's YouTube channel to promote the play transferring to the West End.

[45] The playwright Lou Ramsden has described the play as a major influence on her work, stating that "nothing changed my theatrical outlook quite like [the] first production of Mercury Fur at the Menier Chocolate factory… It showed me that I could do more than just picture a stage – I could use the circumstances of the theatre as well.

The fact that the audience were in an inescapable black box served to ramp up the tension of the play, to unbearable levels... My heart literally pounded.

I was thrilled by the revelation that theatre could be more than just an exercise in language, or a nice, polite, passively watched story – it could elicit a physical reaction, giving people a horrifyingly visceral roller-coaster ride."