Mercer Plays: 2: Flint, The Bankrupt, An Afternoon at the Festival, Duck Song, The Arcata Promise, Find Me, Huggy Bear

Description

The first volume of stage and TV plays by one of the best British TV writers Flint premiered just before the 1970 General Election which was to replace the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. It is driven by the figure of Ossian Flint, a seventy-year old swinging vicar who believes in "crossing lines not drawing them" and espouses the romanticised Communism of Lenin and Guevara; In the BBC play The Bankrupt, Ellis Cripper, a woman aged fifty has become bankrupt through operating at "the dishonourable end of the system capitalism"; An Afternoon at the Festival centres around a version of middle-aged man Leo Brent who is an extreme egoist and a failure in his personal relationships; Duck Song was first produced in the dying days of the failing Heath government and the characters represent a society in decline as the younger characters attempt to find a solution through feminism or psychiatry, it presents "a world to which one cannot relate, which one cannot control, which one can't understand, and which one can't manipulate"; The Arcata Promise centres around the attraction betwen an actor and an inexperienced girl and the destructive conclusion of such an attraction; Find Me returns to the theme of ideological conflict and Eastern Europe; Huggy Bear, a Yorkshire Television production that depicts Hooper, an infantile and philosophical dentist with a "failure to integrate".

David Mercer was born in Yorkshire, the son of an engine-driver, and left school at 14 to become a medical laboratory technician. Before he began playwriting, he joined the Royal Navy and also studied painting and fine arts. Mercer began his career as a dramatist with the trilogy of television plays The Generations (1964). His stage plays include The Governor's Lady, Ride a Cock Horse, Belcher's Luck, Flint (1970), After Haggerty (1970), Duck Song (1974), and Cousin Vladimir (1978). He also wrote the screenplay for the motion picture Providence.