Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Roles: Total (11), Female (4), Male (7), Unassigned (0)

...Leonie has just divorced Morgan on the grounds that, among other offences, he shaved a poodle so that it had a hammer and sickle on its back. Mercer’s darkly comic story of the personal breakdown of Morgan suggests that this ex-Communist...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 17, Roles: Total (8), Female (1), Male (5), Unassigned (2)

...Gathering together the political and social concerns of an era, After Haggerty addresses with breadth and complexity the politics of theatre and personal liberation at a time when social certainties were being rapidly destabilised...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Scenes: 30, Roles: Total (5), Female (2), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...An Afternoon at the Festival is an elegantly-structured and reflective meditation on failure. Leo Brent is an egotistical, successful and middle-aged film-maker. While he is waiting for the four o’clock showing of his new...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 2, Roles: Total (7), Female (2), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...Duck Song is a comic and half-surreal deconstruction, about collective and profound loss of meaning. In a comfortable middle-class house in London, sixty-year-old Herbert is throwing walnuts at the cuckoo clock. His...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Scenes: 41, Roles: Total (13), Female (5), Male (8), Unassigned (0)

...Emma’s Time is the third part of a trilogy, sometimes called the Kelvin trilogy, with On the Eve of Publication and The Cellar and the Almond Tree. In Emma’s Time the fluid cuts between past and present, fantasy and flashbacks show Emma...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Scenes: 61, Roles: Total (4), Female (2), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...Through a story of a poet and a novelist, Mercer studies the position of the political writer in post-war Europe. Marek, the celebrated Polish novelist, turns up outside Olivia’s house. Olivia the poet, whose older husband...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (14), Female (3), Male (11), Unassigned (0)

...The eponymous Flint is a seventy-year-old swinging vicar and romantic Communist, the centre of Mercer’s play about the obsolescence of institutions. The atheistic Flint rides a motor bike, goes bowling, sets fires, and makes love...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Roles: Total (8), Female (5), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...Huggy Bear is a celebration of the primal energies of hunger for satisfaction and experience, in the form of Hooper, an infantile and philosophical dentist with a boundless enjoyment of mastication. Hooper lives with his...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Roles: Total (10), Female (6), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...On the Eve of Publication is the first part of a trilogy, sometimes called the Kelvin trilogy, with The Cellar and the Almond Tree and Emma’s Time. The play is told through the consciousness of Robert Kelvin, a successful, but ageing...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 37, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...The Arcata Promise is a study of the grotesque self-pity of an unstable actor, a merciless account of individual self-delusion and failure. Once a successful actor, Gunge now lives in a grimy basement, arguing...

Methuen Drama, 1994

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Scenes: 21, Roles: Total (7), Female (2), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...David Mercer’s play is a bleakly comic study of the introspective amnesia of Ellis Cripper, who has emerged from his recent dishonourable bankruptcy into a personal crisis, with no idea of how to construct his life. He...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Roles: Total (12), Female (3), Male (9), Unassigned (0)

...The Cellar and the Almond Tree is the second part of a trilogy, sometimes called the Kelvin trilogy, with On the Eve of Publication and Emma’s Time. The play is similarly composed of juxtaposed cuts between past and present, fantasy...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Scenes: 8, Roles: Total (6), Female (2), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...A strange and elusive short play about governors, gorillas and colonialism. In a bungalow in Africa, Harriet is talking about her husband Gilbert as if he was still alive. She refuses to accept that he died of pneumonia...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Contemporary Dramatists

playtext

Scenes: 16, Roles: Total (11), Female (6), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...David Mercer’s movingly naturalistic play takes as its starting point the varieties of dispossession and disparity: between the deprivation of the 1930s and the affluence of the 1950s; and between material prosperity and its accompanying...