Chichester Festival Theatre offers accommodation to NHS

Chichester Festival Theatre bosses are determined to offer hope and practical help during the coronavirus crisis.
Chichester Festival Theatre's Kathy Bourne (Executive Director) and Daniel Evans (Artistic Director) Photo Seamus RyanChichester Festival Theatre's Kathy Bourne (Executive Director) and Daniel Evans (Artistic Director) Photo Seamus Ryan
Chichester Festival Theatre's Kathy Bourne (Executive Director) and Daniel Evans (Artistic Director) Photo Seamus Ryan

The CFT are hoping to start their season in July after postponing/cancelling the first four plays of the spring/summer.

But in the meantime they are determined to play a full role in the community in the current dark days.

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Daniel Evans, artistic director, said: “It has been tough. It has been sent to try us, but we think about what our brilliant NHS is going through and we just want to help them.

“And hopefully we are going to find ways to help.

“We have got in touch with the hospital and said that we have got this building in Broyle Road, the old Comme Ca restaurant.

“We have converted it to house our creative team and some of the actors, and it will be lying empty at a time when it should have been full.

“We told the hospital that we want to help in any way we can. It has got 11 rooms which is not that many in the grand scheme of things, but perhaps it will help.

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“We are just trying to find ways. The theatre van… could it be used to take meals to people? We want to think of things.

“We are determined to travel hopefully, and I have to say that our staff have been fantastic, working closely together… not too closely together. But we are so lucky that we have got such brilliant people.”

The CFT are hoping to go ahead with South Pacific (July 6-August 29) and The Unfriend (July 17-August 22) after announcing the cancellation of the first four plays of the season; Brecht’s The Life of Galileo (which was due to run in the Festival Theatre, April 24-May 16), Stoppard’s The Real Thing (Minerva Theatre, May 7-June 6), Jay Presson Allen’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Festival Theatre, May 29-June 20) and Penelope Skinner’s The Village Bike (Minerva Theatre, June 12-July 4).

The aim is to stage The Life of Galileo and The Real Thing in the autumn (new dates will be announced in due course). They would hope to mount the other two productions at some point in the future.

The point is to believe that the show will go on.

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“We have to hold on to hope, don’t we,” Daniel says. “People come to the theatre for whatever it is, for escapism or delight or education, and we try to make people happy. That is so important. We try to make people’s lives bearable. And we are looking forward to the time when we can do that again.

“And we are lucky that we have been prudent in our house-keeping over the last few years, going back to Jonathan and Alan’s day (Jonathan Church and Alan Finch, artistic director and executive director, for more than ten years), and that means that we are relatively resilient.

“And we are able to move the first two shows. We should be able to produce Galileo and The Real Thing in pretty much the same configuration at the back end of the season, which would be good.

“And as I say, we are fairly resilient, but obviously if the closure is for longer, then obviously it starts to get serious for us.

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“But we always say that the safety of our artists, staff and audiences is paramount. We want to do whatever we can to support the NHS and the main thing is obviously doing our bit not to spread the virus.”

Good news is that the theatre is not looking at any redundancies.

“And we also intend to honour all the artists’ contracts.”

The most vulnerable in all this are the free-lancers – the actors, the directors, the designers: “But we will do our best to honour their contracts.”

Inevitably, work has already been done: “The set of Galileo is built and ready. We have put it into storage.

“The work of the designer of that is two-thirds done.”

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