Promise of a ‘bumper’ year to mark 60th
Chichester Festival Theatre is promising a bumper summer ahead of its 60th anniversary year.
The new season will be announced on March 3. Artistic director Daniel Evans said: “It feels a real privilege to be artistic director during this 60th year. I know 60 is not 75 or even 100 but it is a marker in the sand and 60 is diamond and that’s more than enough!
“In the New Year they were talking about having some kind of circuit breaker and things did feel very precarious before Christmas. Things might have been looking a bit bleak but the fact is that we have got a fantastic season planned and it has been a long time in the planning.
“Some of the things we are doing are dedicated to the 60th anniversary but also we have got a backlog of things that we haven’t been able to do in the last few years.
“And I’m very excited by the range of titles and the range of directors and the range of actors that we have got coming. I have a feeling that we have got a great summer ahead that we are going to be able to pull off.”
All will be revealed at the beginning of March, but in a highly unusual move for highly unusual times he announced three of the plays for this summer late last year.
The summer season will open with plays by Chichester’s Kate Mosse and by Alecky Blythe. Mosse’s play, The Taxidermist’s Daughter, premieres in the Festival Theatre in April 2022, directed by Róisín McBrinn (April 8 to 30). Alecky Blythe’s Our Generation, a co-production with the National Theatre, will be directed by Daniel, opening the Minerva Theatre season (April 22 to May 14). Tickets for both now available.
Festival 2022 will also include Stephen Beresford’s new play The Southbury Child (June 13 to 25), directed by Nicholas Hytner with a cast led by Alex Jennings, a co-production with The Bridge Theatre, opening at Chichester in June before its London run. Tickets go on sale this year.
“There were several reasons why we announced them early, and one of them was that we wanted to celebrate Kate Mosse’s work. It was meant to be happening two years ago and it is a Chichester story. People know the novel in this area and we live surrounded by the landscape in which the novel is set.
“We very much thought that we wanted to open with a Chichester story and we have already sold a third of the tickets for it!”