Using words as weapons

Ben Whishaw is on the phone from Plymouth where he is currently performing in Philip Ridley's new play, Mercury Fur. 'It's going brilliantly,' he enthuses. 'People are really getting into it. I was expecting them to have a real problem with the play, or not come at all.'

Whishaw, you might remember, was one of the surprise theatrical hits of 2004, thanks to his consuming performance as a painfully adolescent Hamlet in Trevor Nunn's production at the Old Vic.

Whishaw was only 23, and virtually unknown, but his performance inspired such adulation that many people bought tickets just to see him. It's unlikely, in this instance, that the Plymouth audiences are there for him rather than the play but for Whishaw that's simply a relief.

'Hamlet was a real pressure because the whole thing rested on my shoulders, he says. 'The joy of Mercury Fur is that it's the work of an ensemble.'

Mercury Fur - which comes to the Chocolate Factory next week - is the second play in Paines Plough's current This Other England season (the first was Enda Walsh's The Small Things). All four were inspired by the subject of language, and in Mercury Fur language becomes the instrument for terrifying games that dangerously blur reality and fantasy.

It's typical Ridley territory - a savage, magical play set in an abandoned East End estate somewhere in the near future where feral teenagers have been forced to construct their own reality in the aftermath of an unknown social catastrophe.

'Each character is forced to tell stories to survive,' says Whishaw. 'The language is really visceral and beautiful, because people are literally depending upon it. It's wonderful to speak: you can just feel a connection with the audience, even when the stuff happening on stage is hard to take. It's great to do something so theatrical but which you know people want to see because it also represents what's happening in the world.'

The urgent urban realism of Ridley's play, and the particular character Whishaw plays, Eliot - the only one who remembers the old world - inhabit very different universes from the court of Elsinore, but Whishaw agrees there is something in Eliot that is also in the young Dane.

Both have suffered terrible loss,' he says. 'With a Ridley play, you don't necessarily get the back story that enables you to see that loss but it's certainly there. And when you've played a part like Hamlet, it stays in you somehow. I'm very aware that Hamlet is sitting in me somewhere, informing the character of Eliot.'

Whishaw laughingly confounds the assumption that he has been deluged with offers since Hamlet, although he did appear in Matthew Vaughn's gangster flick Layer Cake, playing a part that had been specifically adapted for him. He is surprisingly nervous in person for someone so confident on stage.