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

by David Mercer

Stuart Laing (Introduction)

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 0 shelved
Book cover for Mercer Plays: 2

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

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".
  • ISBN10 0413652009
  • ISBN13 9780413652003
  • Publish Date 14 March 1994 (first published 14 June 1990)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 12 July 2023
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Imprint Methuen Drama
  • Format Paperback (A-Format (178x111 mm))
  • Pages 396
  • Language English