3 TV Plays by David Mercer

 

In 3 TV Plays David Mercer published the scripts of A Suitable Case For Treatment, For Tea On Sunday and And Did Those Feet. All were produced and broadcast in 1966 or before, and each one was directed by Don Taylor at the BBC. I probably watched all three plays when they were originally broadcast, no doubt accompanied by my parents initially remarking on the playwright’s origins in nearby Wakefield and then dissolving into “I don’t know why they put out this rubbish on the telly.”

But David Mercer did make an impression on me, especially the later plays On The Eve Of Publication and Let’s Murder Vivaldi, when perhaps I was more able to appreciate their subtlety. But this later work was much more conventional than these earlier plays. 

David Mercer had made his name as a playwright specifically on television, rather than the theatre. His early Where The Difference Begins had explored family relations in a working-class household in which both sons had been educated out of the class and had adopted markedly different lifestyles and politics from their father.

The plays in 3 TV plays, however, find David Mercer in a much more surreal guise, flirting, if that’s the right word, with absurdity. The reaction of my parents was apparently shared by the head of drama of the BBC when Don Taylor, the director, likened Mercer’s work to Ionesco. “Ian who?” was the reply.

A Suitable Case For Treatment is a study in marital breakdown, a situation that Mercer had himself gone through some years before. The play is darkly satirical. Morgan, the principal character, frequently has visions of hammers and sickles, and gorillas, which emphasize the unpredictability of behaviour that clearly led to the breakdown of his relationships. The TV play which reflected this darkness was wiped. The 1960s film of the same script ignores the theme to become a mere frothy comedy.

In For Tea On Sunday, three couples meet to share a gentle social occasion. Unfortunately for five of them, the sixth is what would have been labelled at the time as a “mental case”. He shows up to a London flat with an axe and breaks the place apart. The reactions of the other characters to this show of absurdity is what the play is really about.

In these two plays Mercer presents a character that does not follow conventions of behaviour. It might be argued that the author portrays himself and his personality type. In these plays, he wanted to explore what the reactions of others might be if this tendency was taken to extreme. One is reminded of his first meeting with Don Taylor where Mercer claimed he poured a cup of coffee on the carpet.

And Did Those Feet explores wildly different territory. Unlike the other two plays, the original production survives and is available on the internet. I would encourage everyone to watch it, bearing in mind that this was broadcast midweek at primetime.

And Did Those Feet is a quotation from Blake’s Jerusalem, which, in a setting by Hubert Parry, still features at the last night of the proms. For the general populace, this is a symbol of the establishment, that wall of landed gentry and their professional allies that keeps the hoi-polloi out.

A member of the landed gentry is obsessed with succession. He cannot, however, sire anything but bastards, the twins, Bernard and Timothy, who, though opposites, become inseparable. There are references to Jules et Jim, the apparent uselessness of the upper classes and their hoarding of capital. Their mother goes to live with an artist in Chelsea, who keeps her in a cage, a situation she seems to be quite happy with. In an obvious skit towards the director, a character opines that working class people send their kids to Oxford.

In And Did Those Feet, Mercer approached the surreal. Who cares what it means? There is no plot, incidentally. There is a rubbishing of the upper-class contribution to the war effort by depicting the twins lazing around in Burma. There is a swimming pool sequence where the twins swing on trapezes by candlelight. Reference to Chekov comes when they try to unsuccessfully to shoot themselves. Their father gifts them each a female doll in a coffin. The two bastards then inherit everything and go canoeing on a tributary of the Amazon. Watch it. It was of its time, but who would do something like that now?