Welcome to dystopia

Mercury Fur is one of those well-made plays in which a group of characters gathers for a party and, one by one, each reveals something of their nature in a long and unconvincing bout of reminiscence.

That these speeches describe the gang-rape and murder of a toddler in the cereal aisle of a local supermarket, a husband taking a hammer to the kiddies and a bunch of axemen breaking into a hospital to perform unscheduled operations on the patients does little to ameliorate the conventional nature of the work.

The protagonists of Philip Ridley's play are citizens of a London reduced to anarchy by a new kind of narcotic. Hallucinogenic butterflies - scattered over the city by some enemy power, it seems - have robbed Londoners of their memories and given them a lust for - or a complete insensitivity to - acts of repulsive violence.

Elliot (Ben Whishaw) and Darren (Robert Boulter) are preparing a flat on an abandoned estate for a social event involving peanuts, beer and an act of sadism for which they require a camcorder, a meathook and a small boy.

Among the participants are Spinx (Fraser Ayres), a gangster who prefers not to wear a shirt under his fur jacket, and a tottering case nicknamed the Duchess (Sophie Stanton), so far out of her skull she has confused her own biography with the plot of The Sound of Music.

Their performances are the production's chief attraction. Whishaw plays Elliot as a human flick knife; Stanton's Duchess, utterly dislocated from the brutalities that surround her, is genuinely alarming; Ayres finds nuances in his character that I failed to detect in the script.

Ridley has crafted his dystopia with great attention to detail, but an audience familiar with A Clockwork Orange or any number of naff 1970s zombie films will find that the only novelty he has introduced is a dogged emphasis upon the sexual torture and mutilation of children.

By the time we heard from the man who fantasised about being an American GI slipping hand grenades inside little Vietnamese girls, and the cast were belting around the stage splashed with blood and waving guns and machetes, this theme seemed little more than a questionable authorial indulgence - an exercise in exploitative camp.

But if Ridley's plan was to reduce the sensitivity of the audience until they began to find such images ludicrous and tiresome, then he certainly succeeded in my case.

Until 27 March. Information: 020 7907 7060.

Mercury Fur