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Chichester Festival Theatre
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11476 |
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THE ARTS
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10 / 1986 |
1,593 Words |
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Jane Brace
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Skeptics called it impossible. Lord Olivier called it a miracle. But now, twenty-five years on, champagne corks are popping as the Chichester Festival Theatre celebrates its Silver Jubilee in style.
This year, amid anniversary revels, the theater built "by the people, for the people," is staging a record five shows in twenty-five weeks - a far cry from the initial 1962 season when the performances lasted just nine weeks, and tickets could be had for as little as five shillings a time!
In 1986 the audience witnesses an abundance of the star names that have been the Sussex theater's trademark - Detroit-born Suzi Quatro recently starred as gun-toting Annie Oakley in the Musical Annie Get Your Gun, which has transferred to London's West End, while Googie Withers and Dorothy Tutin joined forces in The Chalk Garden. Currently treading the boards is British sit-com star Richard Briers as the outrageous dandy Lord Foppington in the Restoration comedy The Relapse while English rose Jenny Seagrove takes the title role in Jane Eyre and comic Frankie Howerd dons a Roman serf's toga for the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, directed by M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart.
Chichester has always been about sparkling productions and star names. A success story to end all success stories, the acorn of this sturdy oak was planted on a winter's afternoon in 1959, by Chichestrian Leslie Evershed-Martin.
The innovative Evershed-Martin was watching a "Monitor" TV discussion between Hum Weldon and Tyrone Guthrie on the story of Canada's Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.
The story of a small community's achievement in creating its own open-staged theater captured his imagination. "Here were ordinary people in a remote Canadian town playing a life-size game of Snakes and Ladders and, after many ups and downs, reaching home," he said.
If it could be done on the other side of the Atlantic it could be mirrored in Chichester, he decided. With good theaters already existing in nearby Portsmouth and Brighton it was inappropriate to think about opening a conventional proscenium arch stage - but a thrust stage would be somewhat revolutionary.
Some time later Evershed-Martin was to say: "It is a fact that if we had been out that evening or had turned the television off there would have been no Chichester Festival Theatre."
But of course there was - after much groundwork and the setting up of a trust and fund, Chichester City Council granted a ninety-nine-year peppercorn lease in the beautiful Oaklands Park and the project was off.
Princess Alexandra laid the foundation stone on May 12, 1961, and on July 5, 1962, just three and a half years since that "Monitor' program, the new 1,395-seat theater was opened to the public amid worldwide press attention. The launching play was John Fletcher's The Chances, a lusty, full-blooded comedy.
With excitement running high in the cathedral city, the Festival theatre's first season was underway with the
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