Wildcard and the Mercury Theatre are delighted to announce that on Wednesday 1st June, Evelyn – a new play starring Rula Lenska will perform its world premiere at Mercury Theatre Colchester. The play will run from 1st – 11th June before transferring to the Southwark Playhouse in London where it will run from 23rd June – 16th July.
The play was written by the award-winning playwright Tom Ratcliffe and is set in Walton-on-the-Naze – a place familiar to Tom who grew up in the East of England. Tom developed the play as part of Mercury Creatives, a programme for creative professionals working in the performing arts across Essex, East Sussex, Kent and Suffolk.
Evelyn stars Nicola Harrison (Emmerdale BBC 1, Mayday BBC 1, Good Omens Amazon Prime, BBC Two) as Sandra and Rula Lenska (Rock Follies, EastEnders, Doctor Who, One Foot In The Grave, Footballers’ Wives, Coronation Street) as her unsuspecting – but maybe that’s because there’s nothing to suspect – landlady Jeanne. Yvette Boakye (Love The Sinner SKY/ Roughcut TV, Girls Soho Theatre, The Special Relationship, Soho Theatre) as Laura and Offue Okegbe (Amiens in As You Like It UK Tour/ The Tobacco Factory, Miguel in Children of Fate Inside Intelligence/Bussey Building, Malcolm in Macbeth Custom/Practice) as Kevin make up this intense four-hander performance.
In this dark intelligent thriller, inspired by real life events, Evelyn is a story of mob-justice in modern day Britain that interrogates the question: when is justice really served? This unflinching piece of theatre takes a no-holds-barred look at vigilantism, social media, and our collective quickness to judge, to scorn, to threaten and sometimes, to attack.
The premise of Evelyn saw writer Tom Ratcliffe shortlisted for the 2016 intake of the Old Vic 12 before the play reached the longlist of 27 plays for the 2017 Verity Bargate Award. The play has also been longlisted for the Papatango New Writing Prize and the Theatre503 playwriting Award.
