Regular visitors to the website will know that, as a Cicestrian born and bred, I’m writing the book to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Chichester Festival Theatre. Since CFT first opened its doors, in July 1962, with Laurence Olivier as the first Artistic Director, almost every great actor and actress, director and designer has come to Sussex to work in the dazzling Powell & Moya amphitheatre set in parkland in the north of the cathedral city of Chichester.
© Alberto Arzoz
There have been glory days and dog days: times when nothing went right and the theatre came closing to shutting its doors for good; and times when everything has fallen perfectly into place. These are good times! Going into 2012, the anniversary year, the theatre has been named by The Stage as Regional Theatre of the Year 2011 and the current directors, Artistic Director Jonathan Church and Executive Director Alan Finch, named as some of the most influential people in British theatre. Three CFT productions – Bingo with Patrick Stewart, Singin’ in the Rain with Adam Cooper and Sweeney Todd with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton – are about to transfer into London.
One of the joys of researching and writing the book has been to be given a glimpse behind the scenes as to how theatre works. How reputations are so quickly made, and even more quickly lost, how the sure-fire productions sometimes turn out to be anything but, and how the least likely hits often come out of nowhere. It’s been an exciting – if salutatory – reminder that in theatre, as in books, it is often that slippery thing called luck – in timing, in casting, in context, in fashion – that makes the difference between a modest success and a triumph.
But for me, in the end, the joy of theatre – both on the stage and on the page – is that it is always a relationship between the audience and the actors, the text and the times. The fact that it is real people, delivering real lines on a stage, eight show a week, that makes every performance is unique.
Chichester Festival Theatre at Fifty (published 1 May) is available to preorder on www.unbound.co.uk
