THEATRE
The quality of Mercer
KENNETH HURREN
Bernard Link, the drama critic protagonist of David Mercer's play, After Haggerty, though a man who bears as stoically as any the suffering that is the badge of all his tribe, nevertheless describes his calling at one point as 'writing endless rubbish about endless rubbish.' He had doubtless just come through a week when the works up for review were of a piece in substance and quality with Don't Start Without Me! and The Licentious Fly, a brace of paltry comic endeavours lately arrived at the Garrick and the Mer- maid, respectively. If there is anything in these items that makes them more suitable subjects for rational criticism than, say, a six-day bicycle race, it eluded my scrutiny, and I suggest we revert briskly to the afore- mentioned After Haggerty itself, produced a year ago by the Royal Shakespeare Company and now back in London at the Criterion.
There is no question but that Mr Mercer's play is often enormously entertaining, and that a great deal of the soul-searching that goes on in it is disturbingly pertinent to the ideological dilemmas of our time, as well as having a sprightly and savage humour. It's a pity that it is also in some ways exasperat- ingly woolly and ill-organised. Mr Mercer seems to have begun by pouring ideas into it as prodigally as if he might die on the morrow leaving some avenue of leftist dis- enchantment unexplored, and then to have lost interest in pulling it all coherently to- gether. The construction remains untidily episodic; vagrant thematic threads"are never satisfactorily woven into the main fabric; and Mr Mercer seems to go out of his way to obscure his purpose by tricking the thing out with odd touches of unexplained symbolism.
If I may run over the surface events for the benefit of latecomers, it has to do with the invasion of the drama critic's London flat by an indignant American lady named Claire (Billie Whitelaw) who arrives in, pursuit of her errant husband, Haggerty, former tenant of the flat which Bernard (Frank Finlay) has recently acquired and is having redecor- ated. She has an exhaustive set of grievances against Haggerty (the squalling infant accompanying her is named Raskolnikov, presumably in indication of the crime and punishment of her marriage), and she retails a colourful line in invective and coarse imagery (`My mouth,' she remarks genially, when hting-over, 'tastes like a weasel's fore- skin'); but the resilient Bernard takes her under his roof without protest, and a certain amount of common ground is established between them in the rejections and disillu- sionments that have shaped both their lives.
There are frequent flashbacks, some of them featuring Bernard as a left-wing lecturer whose Marxist faith isn't altogether nour- ished by the demoralising events in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, and others show- ing Claire as a battered survivor of various protest demonstrations and riots in which her association with Haggerty had embroiled her. The subsidiary personnel includes a couple of house decorators (John White and David Wood), and Bernard's dour old father (Leslie Sands), a retired engine-driver visiting from Doncaster, whose old-fashioned attitudes towards homosexuality (personified by one of the decorators), four-letter words and, of course, his son's occupation (which he re- gards as an almost incredibly effete activity for a grown man) set him up as a natural figure of fun for West End audiences. I doubt if it is Mr Mercer's intention to pander to carriage-trade prejudices with this self- righteous old Yorkshireman, but that's the way it turns out; thereby rather fogging, per- haps, the dramatist's pained concern with the unbridgeable gulf between earthy provincial- ism and metropolitan sophistication, and with the remoteness of a left-wing intellec- tualism that is a little nonplussed when con- fronted with a stubbornly conservative proletariat, and can do no more than wring its hands in sorrowful despair at the realities of communist totalitarianism.
Haggerty, to be sure, may be a more de- cisive figure, but he doesn't actually show up, and his connection with the visible action isn't easy to grasp. Telegrams arrive from him, but they are as cryptic as the presence of those two decorators (whom he recom- mended to Bernard). Eventually, as the decorators complete their work, a coffin is delivered bearing a plaque that records Haggerty's death as a guerrilla in some splendid African cause. Mr Mercer, I take it, has something to get off his chest about the respective positions of Bernard, the critical bystander, and Haggerty, the man who is out there in the arena where the blood is, but it would all have come over rather more persuasively if he had sieved out the fancy irrelevances and the portentous obscur- ities. The quality of Mercer could use a little straining.
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