Özet:

This study focuses on Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur (2005), a play which explores various meanings related to a physical labyrinth, memory as a maze, mirror/glass as a labyrinth, etc. The present study aims to disclose primarily the significance of the physical labyrinth, presented in Ridley’s play mostly as a radical space, a reminiscent of Foucault’s “heterotopia”, in which the characters cannot be domiciled, but are rather haunted, their inevitable entrapment creating a perpetual existential feeling of anxiety. This study also attempts to discuss the issue of memory as a maze, revealing the playwright’s concern for the precariousness of memory while the national or individual identities are pursued. In a space in which everyone and everything is manipulated, Ridley’s characters, in their struggle for survival, are forced to re-negotiate all the known thresholds of cruelty and transgression in order to discover the path leading them to humanness and morality.