A CLASSICAL night with one of the country's most acclaimed classical actors.

That's the treat that awaits audiences at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester next weekend when Nocturne: The Romantic Life of Frederic Chopin takes to the stage.

More used to treading the boards at The National or The Globe, Dame Harriet Walter has also been a firm fixture on our screens since the Eighties, with notable film roles in Sense and Sensibility and Atonement, as well as most recently on Downton Abbey as Lady Prudence Shackleton.

So what brings her to Colchester?

Well the latest classical words and music evening by acclaimed pianist Lucy Parham about the composer Frederic Chopin.

Harriet says: "It's really a recital with dramatised readings, which works for both parties really.

"The life of a concert pianist can be quite lonely so I suspect having someone join them on the road is a bonus and for us actors, well we get to hear Lucy play these beautiful pieces each evening."

Lucy’s Nocturne is the story of the tender, but volatile, relationship between Frédéric Chopin and the novelist and feminist, George Sand, the narrative, taken from their letters and diaries, interspersed with some of composer’s best-loved works.

The piano winner of the 1984 BBC Young Musician of the Year, Lucy is quite rightly regarded as one of the country's finest pianists.

It was her life-long passion for the music of Schumann which inspired the original concept of the words and music evening.

Two further evenings, Liszt - An Odyssey of Love and Nocturne - The Romantic Life of Frédéric Chopin have also premiered in the London Piano Series at the Wigmore Hall.

Since then the list of actors who have appeared in the programmes have been very impressive indeed, including Juliet Stevenson, Simon Russell Beale, Rosamund Pike, Patricia Hodge, Dominic West, and Edward Fox.

Joining Harriet for the Colchester date will be two-time Olivier winner Henry Goodman.

She adds: "Lucy has developed a circuit of classical music lovers who just also happen to act. I love the spoken word and sometimes when I have been doing something a little uncultured for the telly, it's a nice reminder of the classic stuff."

Although there's going to be plenty of 'classic' stuff coming up in due course with the final part in her trilogy of all female Shakespeare productions when she takes to the stage of the Donmar Warehouse as Prospero in the Tempest.

"I've already done Julius Caesar and then Henry IV," she tells me, "and I'm really looking forward to playing Prospero. You just treat them like any other Shakespearean role but they are fabulous parts to perform and like with any performance you hope to bring something new to it."

As well leading the vanguard for female actors, Harriet has also recently being banging the drum for older women with her exquisite photographic book, Facing It, in which images of the likes of Anita Pallenburg, Annie Lennox and Cleo Laine sit next to those of non-famous, equally attractive women, all over the age of 50.

“I was facing growing old and had started wondering about my own aspirations," she says. "I want to go on feeling young, positive and ambitious but at the same time, I accept I don’t look the same as I used to.

"It seemed to me there were a lot of fantastic, inspirational older women who may have grey hair, or bags under their eyes, but still look stunning.

"I was sick of this fear people seem to have of growing older and trying to freeze their looks.”

Making the book, which she self-published because 'No publisher would touch it because photographic books are so expensive... and anyway, I was the one who wanted it out there'', changed her own views on the subject of age.

“I’d started off collecting pictures of people I’d like to look like," she continues. "But it made me realise you can’t look like anyone else, especially when you’re older. And why should you want to? It also made me question the notion of vanity.

"I came across a lot of women who told me they dressed for kicks and not to be attractive to anyone else, and I came across others who said they liked the fact being older meant they didn’t have to bother what they looked like, and I realised both views were perfectly valid.”

Currently filming a new television series, which she apologies that she cannot tell me anything about, as well as the acting and performing, Harriet is a keen supporter of the Shakespeare in Schools Festival, which since is inception in 2000 has grown to include more than a thousand schools all over the country.

"I strongly believe," Harriet says, "the next generation of theatre-goers do not get involved unless they perform in theatres as kids. They find it boring unless they actually get up there and do it, which is why the festival is such as great at catching them at an early age. Once their hooked and they get older, they understand more and more about the text.

"Shakespeare didn't write plays to be read in schools, he wrote them to be performed in theatres, and that's why I felt so strongly about getting involved with the festival."

Nocturne: The Romantic Life of Frederic Chopin

Mercury Theatre,

Balkerne Gate, Colchester.

July 2. 7.30pm.

£18.50. 01206 573948.

www.mercurytheatre.co.uk

Federic Chopin

Born in Warsaw in 1810, Chopin is regarded as one of the most virtuosic pianists of all time.

His poetic melodies gained him worldwide fame, even in his own lifetime, which was sombrely short, at the age of 39.

In 1831, he settled in Paris where he made a living giving private lessons and performances, and where he made friends with fellow composer Franz Liszt.

It's also where he met and maintained an often troubled relationship with the French writer George Sand, following a failed engagement to Maria Wodzi?ska.

Between 1838 to 1839 he visited Majorca with Sand and because of the troubles that took place there it became one of his most productive periods of composition.