The Mercury Theatre welcomes actors and artists from across Europe and beyond as it presents five new plays and an International Theatre Symposium as part of the
Mercury International Festival from
Wednesday 26 to Saturday 29 October.
The Mercury’s celebration of international collaboration provides the UK platform for a showcase of
three PLOTS (Places, Links, Opportunities, Transitions, Stories - five theatres who aim to establish a Centre for the Mobility of Artists across geographical boundaries) productions made by European artists.
Passion of Trojan Women
Directed by Salvatore Tramacere & Giorgia Maddamma
Eight performers, dancers, musicians and actors from Macedonia, Poland, Bulgaria and Italy present a physical theatre piece inspired by Euripides’ Trojan Women and the universal themes of passion and death.
Eve Ryman
Devised, Written and Directed by Janice Dunn
This funny, frightening and moving promenade version of the Everyman morality play with a female twist finds six women experimenting together in their different languages, from UK, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland and Macedonia.
tempEst/bUzra
Written and Directed by Pawel Palcat
A minimalist interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest written by Polish actor, writer and director Pawel Palcat. The actors play individual characters in their mother tongues, with a cast again ranging from UK, Poland, Macedonia, Italy and Bulgaria.
The festival centrepiece is the UK premiere of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, adapted for the stage by Mike Maran, a co-production between the Mercury Theatre Company and the Kote Marjanishvili Theatre in Tbilisi. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is directed by one of Georgia’s most celebrated stage directors with incidental music by the country’s best known living composer, and arrives in the UK after premiering in Georgia and Armenia, prior to an international tour in 2012.
The fifth production in the festival is Gari Jones’ Wretch, a UK and Macedonian collaboration, following a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011 and prior to international touring. This disarming examination of the devil within us all, is created with dark digital animations from Macedonian artist Vanja Sheremetkoski. It is a confrontational attempt by one man to purge himself of his past and destroy his future in order to fully live in the present.
The Mercury International Festival will also see Colchester host a gathering of delegates from interACT - an international network of collaborative theatres from which PLOTS developed. Artists from all over the world will be seeing the work and attending a one day Symposium and Open Space on ‘International Theatre – Now What?
The festival builds on the Mercury’s reputation for work that crosses international borders, reflected in 2010’s Romeo and Juliet produced with Argentinean Tango orchestra Astillero, drawing performers from Argentina, Columbia, France and Spain, as well as Hamlet, presented by National Theatre of Macedonia in the same year. The Mercury also toured Bulgaria and Macedonia with Stockholm in 2010.
Read more about all these productions in the What's On section of
this website.
