Chichester Festival Theatre’s new directors are about to unleash their first full season. DUNCAN HALL finds out more.
THE explosion of colour on the front of the new Chichester Festival Theatre season brochure is not an accident. It’s a statement of intent and welcome from the theatre’s two new bosses, artistic director Daniel Evans and executive director Rachel Tackley.
“We wanted to give that festival feel,” says Rachel as the pair snatch a break from preparations for the season opener, Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On which launches on Friday 21 April. “We talked a lot about what a festival feel is about. The clue is in the title: It is a festival, so come and have a good time.”
And that good time runs throughout the Chichester Festival Theatre programme – the first to be created from scratch by Rachel, previously chief executive of English Touring Theatre for eight years, and actor/ director Daniel, who came to Chichester after seven years running Sheffield Theatres. They began, as Rachel says: “With a blank table and Post-It notes. We spent a lot of our early days here meeting people from the local community and listening to what they said. There is a real appetite for new work here. We have a sophisticated theatre-going audience which wants to be challenged.”
And for their first season, which is already the longest in the theatre’s history, there is a great mix of almost guaranteed audience hits such as Alan Ayckbourn’s ingenious three-parter The Norman Conquests and Sir Ian McKellen in King Lear, combined with exciting new work such as an adaptation of Edna O’Brien’s controversial coming of-age novel The Country Girls and Quiz, a play by James Graham based on the story of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’s coughing major Charles Ingram.
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