Mercury Theatre Colchester has today announced that they will present a new revival production of David Greig and Gordon McIntyre’s play with songs Midsummer.
The Mercury Production will run from 3-18 May in the Mercury Theatre and joins the previously announced Mercury Original world premiere production of Martha Loader’s Bindweed and a Mercury Production revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in their 2024 Spring Season.
Penned by award-winning playwright, David Grieg, and composed by songwriter, Gordon McIntyre, Midsummer is a rose-tinted musical rom-com that provides a fast-paced, funny look at love, life, and the ache of aging. The Mercury Production will run from 3-18 May in the Mercury Theatre.
One Midsummer night in Edinburgh, two ill-matched thirty-somethings – a high-powered, hard-¬drinking lawyer called Helena, who’s stuck in a dead-end affair with a married man, and a small-time crook called Bob – collide with one another for one short night of wild abandon. It’s an unlikely coupling as both are all too aware, but it’s Midsummer and anything can happen…
The Mercury’s creative director Ryan McBryde (Baskerville, The Comedy of Errors) will direct the riotously funny, touchingly romantic 90-minute tour d’amour in all its drunken, horny, heartfelt glory.
Ryan McBryde said of today’s announcement, “We’re delighted to be producing David Greig & Gordon McIntyre’s award-winning, Midsummer: a play with songs. It’s funny, surreal and intensely romantic. Full of laughs and tinged with hope, it reads like an intoxicating mash up of Richard Curtis and Irvine Welsh. The play’s central theme – no matter how stuck you feel, change is always possible – feels like a message worth sharing right now.”
The production joins the Mercury Original world premiere production of Martha Loader’s Bindweed and a Mercury Production revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in their 2024 Spring Season.
Oscar Wilde’s beloved comedy The Importance of Being Earnest from 1-16 March 2024. The Mercury Production, which will be directed by the Mercury’s Creative Director Ryan McBryde (They Don’t Pay? We Don’t Pay!, The Comedy of Errors), will give Wilde’s dazzling wit a stylish makeover and will open the theatre’s 2024 season.
The Mercury Theatre, HighTide & New Wolsey Theatre, in association with the Royal Exchange Theatre, will present the world premiere Mercury Original production of Martha Loader’s award-winning play Bindweed. The production is in association with the Royal Exchange Theatre. The production will run in the Mercury Studio from 13-22 June, followed by a run at the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich.
Bindweed is a shattering and darkly funny new play about responsibility and rehabilitation, which looks at what can be done to tackle abuse at its root.
Written by Martha Loader, Bindweed was first written as part of the Mercury Playwrights scheme and won the Judges Award at the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2022. Loader, who is from Ipswich, has had her work presented by HighTide, Mercury Theatre, Cambridge Junction, and INK. She is an Associate Artist of the New Wolsey Theatre and is currently working on commissions from Menagerie Theatre Company, and the Almeida Theatre as part of the ‘Genesis New Playwrights, Big Plays Programme’.
Tickets can be bought at www.mercurytheatre.co.uk
