David Mercer

David Mercer (born June 27, 1928, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Aug. 8, 1980, Haifa, Israel) was a playwright who established his reputation on the London stage in the mid-1960s with plays that examine the decay he saw in English society.

Mercer left school at the age of 14 and became a medical laboratory technician. He eventually joined the Royal Navy and, after his discharge in 1948, studied painting at King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne, and took his B.A. in fine arts at Durham University (1953). He began to write while living in Paris but only became a full-time writer in the early 1960s, after a period of teaching.

Mercer’s first play, written for television, was Where the Difference Begins (1961); it was the first part of a trilogy, The Generations (1964). His Suitable Case for Treatment, televised in 1962, won a Writer’s Guild award and was filmed in 1965 as Morgan—A Suitable Case for Treatment. From that play emerged Mercer’s view of the world as anarchic, despairing, and insane, a view also apparent in The Governor’s Lady, his first stage play (performed 1965), about a man who in utter frustration turned into a baboon and attacked his frigid wife. His other full-length plays include Ride a Cock Horse (1965), Belcher’s Luck (1966), Flint (1970), After Haggerty (1970), Duck Song (1974), and Cousin Vladimir (1978). He wrote the screenplay for the motion picture Providence (1977), which was directed by Alain Resnais.