David Mercer (playwright)

David Mercer (27 June 1928 – 8 August 1980) was an English dramatist.

Mercer was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England. Like the central characters of his plays Where the Difference Begins and After Haggerty, he was the son of an engine-driver. After failing to get into grammar school, Mercer left school at 14, worked as a technician and in the Merchant Navy before attending Kings College, Newcastle (which then awarded degrees validated by Durham University) from where he graduated in 1953. He married Jitke Sigmund, a Czech-born woman who was chief buyer for Marks & Spencer, and spent a year in Paris, where he attempted to become a painter and wrote a novel (about expatriates in Paris) in a style heavily influenced by Percy Wyndham Lewis. In late 1957, now separated and living with Dilys Johnson (whom he later married), he rented a room in a flat at 10 Compayne Gardens, London NW6, that was rented, in turn, by the poet Jon Silkin from Rudolf Nassauer (a wine merchant, poet, and novelist) and his wife, Bernice Rubens, who was later winner of the 1970 Booker Prize. The historical novelist Malcolm Macdonald, then a student at the Slade, was another of Silkin's tenants at that time. There Mercer wrote a more political novel whose acerbic Northern hero, Congo Booth, was an early prototype of many disaffected-marxist heroes in his television work. Neither novel was ever published. All three – Silkin, Mercer, and Macdonald – earned a living teaching English as a Foreign Language at the St Giles School of English in Oxford St. Mercer later taught English and Science at the Hairdressers College until his television and stage earnings freed him to write full-time.

In 1967, Mercer met a German actress, with whom he later had his first child, Maya Mercer.

Mercer began his career as a dramatist with the trilogy of television plays, The Generations, being composed of Where the Difference Begins (1961), the anti-nuclear piece A Climate of Fear (1962) and the non-naturalistic The Birth of a Private Man (1963). A Way of Living (1963) was another naturalistic piece, and dealt with the division between a young fisherman and a girl from a mining family who is about to go to university. Three other television plays from this period - A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962, film adaptation: Morgan, 1966), For Tea on Sunday (1963) and In Two Minds (1967) share a concern with madness or, in the critic John Russell Taylor's words, "social alienation expressed in terms of psychological alienation".In Two Minds was remade as the feature film Family Life (1971), again directed by Loach.

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