Posted on 07 July 2010 by Mark Watson
The Mercury Theatre in Colchester is mailing out its programme for August 2010 to February 2011, and there’s plenty there to like.
The Grapes of Wrath is the main attraction, running over the last fortnight in October. It had a very well received run in the West End, and whilst we won’t be seeing the stars of the London stage, it is recruiting local people for crowd scenes, very much following in the success of the Community Acting Company’s DEPOT last year, which we enthused about here.
Also in the programme
a couple of Harold Pinter plays in November (‘A Slight Ache’ & ‘The Lover’);
some ‘physical theatre’ in ‘Stockholm’ by Bryony Lavery;
’Hamlet’ by William Shakespeare, which is performed in Macedonian with English surtitles (will have to investigate as to what that means exactly!) which is part of an international exchange the Mercury is now part of;
the Christmas panto is Aladdin;
a couple of more traditional comedies in ‘Love’s A Luxury’ and ‘Murdered to Death’ – the latter with Norman Pace, Sandra Dickinson, and Victor Spinetti;
and in the same style as ‘Porridge’ which we saw and reviewed here, there is ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, with Gareth Hale takign the part of Onslow and Rachel Bell as Hyacinth Bucket
some modern dance from Maresa von Stockert
there are some smaller scale challenging productions fromthe Mercury Studio Theatre
some blasts from the past in the shape of Chris Dean’s Syd Lawrence Orchestra; the Searchers, Acker Bilk; Elkie Brooks; Jimmy Greaves; Jimmy Tarbuck OBE
opera in the shape of a Mid Wales Opera production of Falstaff; and classical music from Julian Lloyd Webber
a number of children’s productions, including A Christmas Carol; and youth theatre
comedy in the shape of a One Man Lord of the Rings; Punt & Dennis
So head over to their website for more information. We’ll be reportin back on a couple of the productions!
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The Surtitles used for the production of Hamlet consist of an electronic caption box above the action giving the English translation. Surtitles only differ from Subtitles in so far as they are above the action instead of below it.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for clarifying this Luke. I remember years ago listening to a Dutch or German version of Hamlet and the bit that in English is ‘Hamlet, this is your father’s ghost’ came out as ‘Hamlet, dis is die vater’s spook’, which I quite liked the sound of!