ABSTRACT
It is seldom, even today, that a headline in the Radio Times
has some sensational news to impart. But m any readers in
February 1970 must have been pulled up short by ‘ “ This” ,
says D avid M ercer, “ is m y swan-song to politics” .’ ‘This’ was
his latest television play, The Cellar and the Almond Tree, or
rather the trilogy o f which it is the middle section: and the
intelligence would be news indeed, seeing that o f all our new
playwrights M ercer is the one who has most consistently
worried at the political theme in his works. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that he is the only one who seems to
have felt, as a dramatist, more than an occasional, dutiful
interest in politics, in man as a political animal, and in the
dram atic possibilities o f political life and political action as a
vital part o f his characters’ everyday existence. T h e news, as it happens, is not quite so clear-cut as the
headline-writer made out. In the body o f the piece M ercer is
quoted as saying that the trilogy is ‘partly m y swan-song to
conscious politics in dram a’ and in a television interview on
Line-Up after the play he amplified this statement as rep
resenting a feeling that he had, not that politics as such was a
dead subject for him, but that it was becoming part o f a
wider and more inclusive world-view which made it less and
less possible for him to confine his characters within an
explicitly political framework. T h at is rather different, and
indeed is something we could have seen for ourselves right
aw ay in his very earliest plays, the trilogy called The Genera
tions. There the progression was clear enough. The first
play, Where the Difference Begins (1961), was easily the simplest
and, superficially, the most realistic he has ever written; it
was a straightforward piece o f social documentation about the
growing-away o f two sons from their working-class father
because o f the changes made in them by education and by
their inevitable graduation (or decline, i f you like) into the middle classes. T h e second play in the group, A Climate o f
Fear (1962), moved out into a direct confrontation with the
most burning political issue o f the time, nuclear disarmament.
