Mercer, David

Mercer, David (1928–80), English playwright, whose plays reflect an interest in both politics—he was a disillusioned Marxist—and schizophrenia and madness. He was already well known for his television plays when in 1965 the RSC staged his one-act political play The Governor's Lady. In the same year Peter O'Toole appeared in Ride a Cock Horse as the working-class anti-hero alienated from his background by his success as a writer; it was produced in New York in 1979. Two further plays, Belcher's Luck (1966) and After Haggerty (1970), the latter about a dramatic critic with a sense of professional importence, were produced by the RSC. Michael Hordern played the title-role of Flint (also 1970), a lecherous and agnostic clergyman who elopes with a pregnant Irish girl. The eponymous hero of Cousin Vladimir (1978), a fugitive from Soviet Russia confronted by the moral degeneracy of modern England, perhaps mirrored Mercer's own perplexities; and No Limits to Love (1980) concerns the sexual and other relationships between four intellectuals, a woman and three men. Both were presented by the RSC.