In London, "Minsk, 2011" and "Mercury Fur" LONDON - Words don't come easily in the opening moments of "Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker," the lacerating new work from the Belarus Free Theater. The latest offering from this astonishing troupe in exile, which recently closed at the Young Vic Theater, begins with individual performers walking up to a microphone. Each pauses, hesitates, starts to unfold a flag, play a flute or merely glance at a wristwatch. Then, before any of them utters a sound, they are dragged out of sight by a troop of stocking-capped men. In place of the usual production credits, the program cast and crew biographies list incidents of arrest, imprisonment and blackballing. Conceived as a response to "New York in 1979," an erotic anatomy of the city by the novelist Kathy Acker, this production presents Minsk as a place where sex is a thwarted, warping force. Like the Nemiga River that runs beneath the city, erotic impulses have been forced underground. And the encounters presented here - between a prostitute and a john; a group of topless dancers and a government official; anxious patrons in a secret gay club; an aspiring stripper and two men she meets on the Internet - usually stop short of consummation. There are first-person testimonials, and accounts of geographical and economic statistics and of distant and recent history. There is a stunning coup de théâtre in which a naked woman is covered in ink and pressed onto a roll of brown paper, which is then fashioned into a cocoon from which she vengefully emerges with a whip. In one sequence, women who have been charged with prostitution are set the surreal, fairy-tale-like task of sweeping up snow. The final scene of the production, directed by Vladimir Shcherban, lets the performers describe their feelings about Minsk. While "Minsk" summons a city suffocating beneath an oppressive state, Philip Ridley's savage and utterly gripping "Mercury Fur" imagines another European capital as a land of lawlessness. That's London in what - if you're in the right (or wrong) mood - feels like the all-too-foreseeable future. "Mercury Fur," which ended its limited run at Trafalgar Studios recently, offers the most merciless vision of a self-devouring Britain since Sarah Kane's "Blasted" rattled audiences here in 1995. They are in charge of drinks, snacks, décor and, most important, the care, feeding and costuming of the Party Piece, in this case a boy dressed up for the, er, entertainment of a prosperous paying guest. These would seem to have been assembled from the ashes of a city ravaged by uncontrolled rioting. Of the people who come and go in the flat - including an inquisitive squatter next door (Sam Swann); a hulking makeshift entrepreneur (Ben Dilloway); and his blind, bejeweled girlfriend (Katie Scarfe) - only Elliot and his lover, Lola (James Fynan), have much of a memory left. Everyone else takes hallucinogens (in the form of different-colored butterflies) that erase and blur recollection, while scrambling traditional lines of family, gender and feeling. Though the plot assumes an obtrusive capital P in the second act, the cast - rounded out by Ronak Raj as the Party Piece and Henry Lewis as the Party Guest (from the City, wouldn't you know?) - is terrifyingly in the moment throughout. I understood the impulse, since by that time I was looking at the stage through the splayed hand I'd clamped over my eyes. There had been moments I responded that way during "Minsk, 2011." Yet in both cases, I felt strangely hopeful, as I had when I first saw "Blasted."