Following StageWright’s excellent Shedding Skin and Packing Shed Theatre’s sell out run of Memento Mori, it’s now the turn of Colchester’s other professional theatre group to take to the Mercury stage.

That’s Protocol Theatre who will be performing Nina Raine’s acclaimed debut, Rabbit.

Rabbit tells the story of Bella who does the unthinkable, gathering friends and ex-lovers for her 29th birthday while her father lies dying in a hospital bed.

It’s being directed by Robbie Taylor Hunt, who after leaving Cambridge University has already had a measure of theatrical success with Wife, a play based on the poems of Carol Ann Duffy performed by her daughter Ella, which had runs at the Jermyn Theatre, London, and the Edinburgh Fringe.

He says: “While I was at uni I did another Nine Raine play called Tribes and it was while doing it for my final show that I fell in love with her writing. Both Tribes and Rabbit are about families and how people do terrible things to the people we love. She’s especially great at writing arguments which are both brutal and painful.”

Famously Nina, frustrated by years of trying to get people to put on Rabbit, hired the Old Red Lion Theatre in London in 2006 to put on her debut play.

Directing herself, following a hugely successful run it transferred to the Trafalgar Studios later that autumn when she won both the 2006 Evening Standard’s Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright and the Most Promising Playwright Award at the 2006 Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards.

Since then she’s been regarded as one of the country’s most promising new playwrights with her latest work, her fifth play, being premiered at Nicholas Hytner’s new Bridge Theatre. It’s based on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach and has Simon Russell Beale playing the famous composer.

For Protocol’s Rabbit, Robbie has assembled a cracking cast of local talent including Yasmin Jafri as Bella and Tim Freeman, who plays her dad. It also includes Richard Conrad, Charlotte Luxford, Chris Anderson and Zoe Biles.

Protocol (which stands for professionals together in Colchester) was set up last year by Richard, Joseph Lyndon and Alice Murray with the idea of plundering the wealth of local artistic talent that now resides in and around the area.

After applying, and getting accepted on to the Mercury Theatre’s Early Career Training Programme, Richard met up with director Joseph, originally from Witham and Coggeshall, and movement director Alice, as well as Robbie, who was also on the scheme.

With both Joseph and Alice moving away, Richard has now recruited the skills of actor and producer Jonathan Davis, who recently appeared in Shedding Skin and Colchester Operatic Society’s Hairspray.

Their first show was Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, which also starred Tim Freeman, Jonathan and Richard, and took place at St Martin’s Church in Colchester.

Rabbit is at the Mercury Studio Theatre, Colchester, from March 23 to 24 at 6pm with 1pm matinee on the Saturday. Tickets are £13.50, available by calling 01206 573948 or on-line at mercurytheatre.co.uk