At the Mercury we support and champion writers and new writing. Each year within our eclectic programming mix, we commit to staging three new plays, known as ‘Mercury Originals’ in our Studio space. These are cutting edge stories from local artists.
Our most recent Mercury Original ‘I Really do Think This Will Change Your Life’ by Emma-Louise Howell was shortlisted for The Stage Innovation Award 2024.
Other successes have included ‘The Instrumentals’ a co-production with Little Angel and Goblin Theatre which, after a UK tour in 2023, was remounted for the Imagine children’s Festival at the Southbank Centre earlier this month.
These are just two of the five new writing works, for the studio, to have been commissioned and produced since we reopened in 2021. We currently have three more new plays on the studio slate for this coming year with another five new plays and adaptations in various stages of commission and development. We’ve commissioned 2 full productions that have been staged in the theatre and we have a further 4 commissioned plays at various stages on the slate for the theatre space.
Over the last year, the Mercury have worked alongside 108 playwrights, at varying stage of their careers as part of our talent development programme. We have enabled 10 week long R&Ds of which 2 have already been produced as Originals in the Studio, 2 are slated to be produced next year and 1 is currently on a UK wide tour with another is about to go into production for a national tour. This is one aspect of how we work with writers.
The Mercury’s talent development programme, includes nine-month courses in Producing, Playwriting and Directing – our Mercury Originals often start their life here and each year the producers, writers and directors on this programme take over the Mercury Studio for R&D’s and to showcase works in progress during our “Mercurial Takeover”.
This year one of the producers on the development programme, Jamie Rycroft, brought us an interesting notion – getting your play on is such a lottery, why not have a night in the Studio where one play, from a local playwright, is chosen at random by way of a of a lottery contest? Jamie’s idea was to mount a rehearsed, script in hand, reading for one night of the “winning” play for his part of the Takeover.
No one involved in the Lottery – neither Jamie nor the Mercury – meant to show any disrespect to playwrights. The exact opposite is true. The idea for this one-night event is to highlight how hard it is for playwrights to get their work noticed and new producers to bring work to the stage. We hope that the winner would show enough potential on that one night that they would be accepted on the Mercury playwriting course for the following year. The Producing, Playwriting and Directing programme is about discovery and support, it’s a learning process that sits alongside other script development, R & D and script reading that goes on year round.
Newer Blog Post Older Blog Post Back to Blog
