Events Archive > Mercury Reads: Kingdom Come

Mercury Reads: Kingdom Come

Show Information

Showing on:

Fri 20 February 2026

Duration:

4-6pm

Price:

Genre:

Array

Venue:

Upstairs Bar

Show Bio
Cast & Crew

Join us for Mercury Reads a series of lively rehearsed readings celebrating local voices and fresh new writing. Each event spotlights an exciting playwright from our region, giving audiences the chance to see new stories take shape for the very first time.

In this session, join us in the Upstairs Bar on Fri 20 Feb at 4pm as we look at Mercury Reads: Kingdom Come by Lydia Sabatini.

Two women with metastatic cancer enter a cabin in the forest… and see some strange things.

Barb and Claudia are two not-quite-friends in their 70s who head deep into a forest to get some rest and relaxation. They get on well despite their differences: Barb wants to be in nature, Claudia hates dirt and wants to cook and play music.

But when one day Barb returns from the forest totally changed, their different attitudes, to life, illness and family start to come between them, threatening to uproot everything they know about themselves and how they want to spend the time they have left.

Lydia Sabatini

Lydia Sabatini is a London-based playwright originally from Essex. Her work has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for playwriting in 2021 and longlisted in 2023. She has participated in the Bush Theatre’s Emerging Writers Group 2021/2, the Traverse Theatre’s Breakthrough Writers: In Residence Programme 2022/3, the Mercury Theatre’s Playwrights Programme 2022/3, the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme 2023/4, Orange Tree Theatre’s Writers Collective 2023/4 and BOLD Playwrights 2024 and the Royal Court Writer’s Group 2025. She co-wrote CONSUMED with her theatre company Dreambite Collective which ran at Camden People’s Theatre in 2024.

Anni Domingo

Claudia

Anni Domingo is an Actress, Director and Writer, who works extensively in Radio, TV, Films and Theatre throughout America, Europe, Africa and UK.

Anni’s work is varied and includes programmes such as Eastenders as well as Inua Ellam’ Three Sisters at the National Theatre.

Anni’s poems and short stories are published in various anthologies and her plays produced in the UK. An extract from her novel Breaking the Maafa Chain is featured in the New Daughters of Africa (2019) anthology.

Her first screenplay Blessed Assurance has just been filmed and her debut novel, Breaking the Maafa Chain, was published in September 2021 by Jacaranda and has been published in New York and in Brazil. She is writing her next novel, Ominira, as part of her PhD at King’s College London.

Annette Badland

Barb

Annette Badland is an award winning actor of Theatre, TV and film.

Theatre includes: Escaped Alone & What If (Royal Exchange), Hansel & Gretel, After Edward, Edward II, Eyam, The Winter’s Tale (Globe), The Play What I Wrote (Theatre Royal Bath), Our Lady of Blundellsands (Liverpool Everyman), Far Away (Bristol Old Vic), Kin (Royal Court), As You Like It, Romeo & Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, Summerfolk, The Marrying of Ann Leete , Love’s Labour’s Lost (RSC), Alphabetical Order, Slavs (Hampstead), Blithe Spirit (Royal Exchange), The Golden Hour (Almeida), The Vortex (Bill Kenwright, West End), Habeas Corpus, Measure for Measure (Peter Hall Company/RSC), Dr Faustus, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Young Vic), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (National Theatre), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Haymarket).

TV includes: Run Away, Black Ops, Midsomer Murders, Ted Lasso, Patterns, Big Boys, Heartstopper, Inside No 9, Brassic, DI Ray, Beyond Paradise, Whitstable Pearl, Casualty, Silent Witness, The Crown, Criminal, Strike: Lethal White, Doctors, Shakespeare and Hathaway, Hold the Sunset, The Dumping Ground, Agatha Raisin, Plebs, Not Going Out, EastEnders, Outlander, The Sparticle Mystery, Wizards vs. Aliens, Aunties, Father Brown, Cutting It, Man Down, Snodgrass, Bad Girls, Land Girls, Little Crackers, Skins, Casanova, Doctor Who, Poirot, Last Days of Summer, The Naked Civil Servant.

Film includes: Flavia, The Toxic Avenger, Portraits of Dangerous Women, Sisi and I, Operation Napoleon, The Act, The Man Who Invented Christmas, A Quiet Passion, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Little Voice, Twenty Four Seven, Jabberwocky.