The cellar and the almond tree

First broadcast in 1970, 'The Cellar and the Almond Tree' is the central instalment in a trilogy of television plays (framed by 'On the Eve of Publication' and 'Emma's Time') about the life and death of a famous left-wing writer Robert Kelvin. Here, Mercer moves the action out of England into a central European communist country in the late 1940s, where a former friend of Kelvin's, Volubin, a poet who has become a party official, is enmeshed in the political machinery of a state about to plunge into a succession of Stalinist purges.