Justin Wells is a brave director. Cambridge has many who'd like to consider themselves 'edgy', but few have taken on a play as controversial Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur. And it's his directing debut.

The play, which contains sickening scenes of child mutilation, was refused publication by Faber and Faber in 2005 on the grounds of its 'gratuitous' violence. Critic Charles Spencer claims it “positively revels in imaginative nastiness”. It is set in a vicious, dystopian version of London (“like UKIP’s worst view of society blown up a billion times”), and even Wells admits it is the only play he’s ever had to put down while reading.

However, he is adamant that accusations of gratuitousness completely miss the point. “Although it’s violent, it’s also fiercely moral, taking an aggressive stance. That’s one of the things I really like about Ridley. A lot of modern theatre gets to that very cynical, ambiguous stage – 'We don’t know where we stand'. With Ridley, though you might not agree with his view, it’s refreshing to see someone say 'This is where I stand, this is what I believe’. The violence grabs attention in a good way, not in a grandstanding way. He strips away all the style and glamour and shows that it is just horrible.”

Ridley’s London is “like the London we know reflected in a shattered mirror”. It is a completely different, broken world, but the audience will still find things they know about reflected in it. “I’m wary of raising such a big topic in a student production, but, if you think about the Holocaust – the idea of guards being actively involved, and prisoners in the camps who had to morally debase themselves to survive, by getting rid of the bodies as part of their work for example – the play’s raising similar issues about what you’d do in those situations.”

“Recognising that people who do terrible things are real human beings is something that we have a real problem with. You watch almost any film about the Nazis and they will be caricatured. It’s very easy to do, because with such horrific acts it’s natural to want to distance yourself and say ‘No they’re abberations, they’re weird, get them away from me – they don’t represent humanity.’ That way we don’t need to think about the implications of why they did it, what for, why someone else could do it... We can just sweep it under the carpet.”

Ridley’s evocative dialogue and unsettling characters break through this comforting fiction. “The characters are people who, before they lived in this terrible society, you might have met them and liked them. Then within this society they do terrible, awful things. But they are still recognisably people.”

By saying everyone has the capacity for evil, is the play excusing it? Wells is convinced not. “It’s important to recognise the humanity in monsters not so you can say ‘Ooh look, they’re just misunderstood’, but so you can say ‘Look, this isn’t a monster, this is a person – it could be you or me.’”

Yet though the play points out the potential for evil in all of us, it does not present it as inevitable. “The characters are tainted by the society they live in. They are morally bankrupt, every single one of them, whether it’s through implicit acceptance of the situation or something more. But what’s important is that the characters are very aware that they have morally debased themselves and they hate it.”

“It’s much more subtle than just having them say ‘I am good and I shall stop this’; ‘I am bad and I will not.’ It is giving the message that you can be complicit in these things, but you don’t have to be. You do have a choice. You can choose not to engage in them, even if it’s at the last minute when there seems to be no hope left. The only truly irredeemable character is the one who completely accepts the situation and is enjoying it.”

“It’s not uncritically hopeful, but it says that even if we’re not in the best place now, we can improve. The central characters are members of a quasi family, fighting for survival, and the play is very concerned with love between siblings, between parents and children and in general. Although that love is twisted, it’s shown as one of the only pure, good things left. It’s a powerful, central force for good, and that’s what matters.”

This play could have relied on some glib link to the London riots and propagated a lazy 'aren’t humans bad?' philosophy. Instead, by exploring the spectrum of evil, Wells is aiming for something far more poignant and challenging.     

Mecury Fur "isn’t conceptual, but it prompts a conceptual response,” sums up Wells. “That’s probably the most pretentious thing I’ve ever said.”

Mercury Fur runs at the Corpus Playroom from Tuesday February 18th to Saturday February 22nd