David Mercer and the Mixed Blessing of Television

David Mercer and the Mixed Blessing of Television JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR The history of television drama in Britain, and the situation of serious dramatists in relation to it, is scattered with ironies, most of which are perfectly exemplified in the prolific even though sadly curtailed career of David Mercer. Television giveth, and television taketh away - never more evidently than in Mercer's case. Mercer first made his reputation in television, and though he was to become a fairly productive writer for the theatre (and occasional writer for the big screen), he continued throughout his life to write for television. Of course he regretted, as anyone in the medium must, the ephemerality of the television play, and the cursory attention (if any attention at all) which is likely to be vouchsafed it. And yet he was a consummate master of the form, in a way that he never quite became with the stage play, and was never discouraged enough to skimp his talents because it was "only" a television script. Indeed, if anything he put more ofhimselfinto his television work than into anything else; he was rewarded, if that is the word, by having more of his television plays published than any other writer I can think of. And yet the fact remains that when he died (in 1980, at the age of fifty-two), his reputation was felt to be circumscribed by his, as some commentators saw it, perverse dedication to television: if only, they said, he had ever really made it by achieving a comparable success in the theatre. Actually, he did have some success in the theatre, but mostly of esteem only, and in circumstances - major subsidised companies like the Royal Shakespeare , or semi-fringe theatres - which would seem virtually to preclude commercial success on a grand scale. Many artists have got by with less, but somehow it did not seem to be quite what he had in mind: all of the eight full-length stage plays produced in London during his lifetime suggest, one way and another, that he saw himself addressing a far wider public than he was able in fact to reach. His stage plays are seldom very subtle and refined in conception (though the thoughts they express are quite a different matter), and he tends to David Mercer and Television 437 mix tones and genres in a way which should give a relatively unsophisticated, popular audience less trouble than an audience already sampling the dangers of a little learning. His first, Ride a Cock Horse (1965), while not necessarily written for large-scale West End production by Peter O'Toole, the star who took it on, does at least presume that it will have a big star ofsome kind to splash around in the bitter rhetoric and spectacular regression to infantilism of its writer-hero - and hence that it is not intended for some minority audience. Such later plays as Belcher's Luck (1966) and Flint (1970), with their serio-comic celebrations of animal vitality and the unclassifiable earth-father character too big and untidy to be fitted into conventional patterns ofmorality or social order, are again painted in the bold colours of the billboard, not with the delicate touches of the cabinet picture. But the way the British theatre has been constituted during the 1960's and 1970'S made some pigeon-holing inevitable, and if Mercer regarded himself the evidence is that he did - as potentially a popular, unintellectual sort of dramatist, he was bound, but for some extraordinary stroke of luck, to be barking up the wrong tree. Whatever was not unmistakably aimed at the lowest common denominator would not find itselftherefore debarred from production, but could expect to be produced only in the specialized areas where almost all of Mercer's plays found themselves: audiences seeing them within the confines of the Royal Shakespeare Company would certainly go braced for one of those difficult modern plays, and so appreciate them, when they did appreciate them, rather for the intricacies of their thought than for the bold strokes of their dramaturgy. And once Mercer had come to be labelled a highbrow, intellectual playwright, the chances of his carrying his dramatic thought...