Do you remember the great Rolling Stones drugs bust?
Chichester Festival Theatre will take you fully into the world of The Rolling Stones and mid-1960s Chichester with a special immersive, experiential exhibition later this summer.
And they are inviting you to share your anecdotes and memories with them.
The exhibition will be in the foyer during the run of the play Redlands by Charlotte Jones. On the mainhouse stage from Friday, September 20-Friday, October 18, the piece will tell the story of the infamous 1967 Stones drugs bust at Keith Richards’s country house just south of Chichester – a bust which put two of the Stones in jail. Suddenly Chichester was the centre of national and international media frenzy as a huge and angry debate raged – both for and against the band.
Helena Berry, heritage and archive manager at Chichester Festival Theatre, will help bring it all alive. The exhibition she is masterminding will not be static cases. As she says they are not a museum: “We are going to flip it all on its head. We're a theatre and we want something that people can come and engage with and interact with.”
Anyone who can help Helena should get in touch with her with their suggestions via heritage@cft.org. uk. The deadline is the end of June.
The exhibition will be around the entire horseshoe shape of the foyer, Helena said: “And we are hoping that it will be immersive and experiential. It is not going to just be archive objects. We're hoping to have some interactive screens with newspaper articles about the trial and the period and all that happened. And we're hoping to set up an exciting vinyl wall that we hope the members of the community will design things for and that you can have your picture taken in front of.”
It's about capturing a sense of why it all mattered: “I grew up in Chichester and as soon as I mentioned this to my parents, they were talking about it for 20 minutes. It is something that people do remember and I'm hoping to mobilise the people of Chichester just to think about their memories or if they don't remember it, then their parents’ memories, just recollections of the Redlands trial and of Chichester at that time. We've already had some people approach us with wonderful memorabilia. It was Chichester's ten minutes of fame.
“We are hoping to have a wonderful visual installation to put people's memories on and we're hoping to have interactive screens as well. I'm working with the records office and they're helping us with a lot of newspaper archives.”
Helena has read the first draft of the script: “And it is really fun. That was my first thought. It's going to be great fun, and it's one of those pieces that needs an audience. You need the moments for the laughter that will drive it but it has also got a message behind it. It is going to have quite some power punch.”
At Keith Richards’ country house Redlands in deepest West Sussex, the Rolling Stones are enjoying a bohemian night in with the likes of Marianne Faithfull and George Harrison until the constabulary swoop down and charge Keith and Mick Jagger with drug offences.
Only one man can defend the two icons of the 60s revolution: Michael Havers, leading QC and future attorney general. But the furore also brings into the spotlight his own relationship with his son, aspiring teenage actor Nigel Havers, who’s been drawn into Marianne’s orbit… As Helena says: “The central thread is from Nigel Havers’ perspective and I think that that’s going to give it a really personal element. I think you're not going to be outside the action. It's going to feel really personal and I think you will feel really connected.”