Bernard is a jaded, self-declared Marxist, middle-aged theatre critic who is seeking a break with the past. It is 1970 and he jets around a world in political turmoil - Budapest, Prague and Paris - giving lectures that all begin by referencing Look Back in Anger, the play that supposedly revolutionised British drama. In his personal life, Bernard is trying to turn his back on the past, too: he seldom visits his elderly father - a working-class Labour-voting bigot - who lives in Doncaster and with whom the educated Bernard has nothing in common, and he has just moved into a new flat that he is having decorated to erase the past. But then somebody else's past catches up with him in the shape of Claire, the brittle, angry wife of the flat's previous occupant, Haggerty.
David Mercer's 1970 play is most curious; it is like watching bits from other post-1956 plays. As in Godot, the Haggerty of the title never turns up, although in a farcical Ortonesque flourish he does send a wreath and a coffin. At times the dialogue feels like Wesker, at others it glowers with menace reminiscent of Pinter, and when we return to the theatre after the interval there is a terrifying display of Hair-influenced performance art. This constant self-referencing is one big theatrical in-joke but not, alas, a very entertaining one.
Mercer will be remembered as TV's first great playwright with A Suitable Case for Treatment and the script for Ken Loach's Family Life. This 1970 stage play would have been better left to rest in peace rather than disinterred for the Finborough's Rediscoveries season, particularly as Kirsty Housley's slack production does it no favours, and several of the performances - although not David Cann as Bernard - are not just doubtful but downright dodgy. As a document of a world where the social and political postwar certainties are collapsing, After Haggerty has some clout, but it is mostly a bore.
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