Confident Chichester Festival Theatre planning its 2021 season

If you are looking for reasons to be cheerful, then ponder this: Chichester Festival Theatre artistic director Daniel Evans is already planning the 2021 summer season.
Daniel Evans, Artistic Director of Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo by Tobias Key.Daniel Evans, Artistic Director of Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo by Tobias Key.
Daniel Evans, Artistic Director of Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo by Tobias Key.

This year’s summer season was first delayed and then cancelled as theatres remain shut up and down the country. But Daniel has already vowed to ensure the CFT will be ready to reopen the moment it can safely do so, in accordance with whatever guidelines will come with the permission when it is granted.

The hope – if all goes well – is for a revised shorter programme of work from autumn 2020, including Pinocchio over the Christmas period.

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But Daniel is also working on a new schedule for 2021 which he hopes will include some of the planned Festival 2020 shows, among them the premiere of the stage version of Chichester-based novelist Kate Mosse’s The Taxidermist’s Daughter.

“We will definitely want to be doing Kate’s play. The advance sales were really strong for it, and there is also the localness of it.”

The hope is also to reschedule South Pacific and The Unfriend to 2021.

His point is that the CFT is a long way from being worried about its future: “We have just started having our first Zoom meetings about what 2021 will look like. I think the important thing is that flexibility will be the key. We will have a plan and we will travel hopefully and we will be ready to adapt that plan when the news comes that we can re-open.”

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There is some talk that a vaccine could be ready this year; some that it will take years. There is also the possibility of a second wave: “But if they say that only young people can come when we open, then we will play to that audience.”

As for next year: “In one sense, you have to start again with every season because every season is a balance, and the balance is something that we will have to maintain. So next year is a blank page, but it is blank page with a few colourings around the edges!

“Sadly, though, there is some work from this year that we cannot do next year. We can’t do The Real Thing next year because another major theatre are doing it.”

The CFT can’t simply carry the rights over: “It is a question of who is in possession at the time. But we will try to include as much of the work as we can. But also we had already got some things planned for next year that we are quite far down the line with. It will be a particularly difficult jigsaw puzzle, but what is good is that we are talking about people coming back.”

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Daniel believes that theatre, to an extent, will be returning to a different world: “One of the interesting things has been the proliferation and acceleration of digital work. And I will bet you any money that there are digital creative people up and down the country thinking what can the theatre do. And I think we will have to explore that as another way of bringing people in.

“Streaming is definitely here to stay, but I am talking about what a hybrid between live and digital performance might look like. There are some amazing innovations about how digital technology can be melded with live performance. And I would not be surprised if that is something that stayed with us.”

And no, he doesn’t believe that streaming is in any way a threat, too much of a temptation for people to stay at home rather than come and see live theatre again when they finally get the chance.

“Theatre is such a primal ancient thing, that one group of people sit in a room in front of another group of people that stand up and tell them a story. There is a big part of that that will always be unchanged because it is so pure.

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“I think one of the things that is starting to happen with Zoom meetings is ocular fatigue! No, there is nothing that can really substitute for actually being there in the same room and actually seeing it happen.”

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