You have to think seriously about taking a South Coast cottage for the summer after Chichester’s announcement of its six-month season stretching from Felicity Kendal in The Last Cigarette, adapted by Hugh Whitemore from Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries, through to Stephanie Cole in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables by way of Joseph Fiennes as Cyrano, Diana Rigg as Judith Bliss in Hay Fever and Iain Glen in Schiller’s Wallenstein.

The Schiller might frighten the horses and sounds a little too much like the sort of thing critics love reviewing but audiences find less essential on the Sussex Downs. Still, it is in the smaller Minerva space.

I heard a lovely story about veteran Chichester and West End producer Duncan Weldon chiding Ruth Mackenzie, one of the triumvirate who ran up huge debts before Jonathan Church started to turn things round two years ago.

“Your trouble, dear, is you don’t like Stars.” “Oh Duncan, ” she replied, “you know we don’t use the S-word.” “Yes,” said Weldon, “and that’s because you don’t like the A-word, either…Audiences.”

Ruth — who now works as an “expert adviser” at the government’s department for culture, media and sport — did a great job with Martin Duncan and the late lamented Steven Pimlott, but nobody wanted to go and see their shows apart from the critics.

Another veteran Chichester producer and artistic director, John Gale — happily recovering from a serious heart operation six weeks ago — reminded me over the weekend that when he presented Alec Guinness in The Merchant of Venice (not an especially good production, he admits) the place was packed, not a seat unsold; when Ruth and Martin mounted a much better production with Desmond Barrit as Shylock, you couldn’t give seats away.

The audience in Chichester, which is a small market town, has to be bolstered by folk coming down from the hills and in from the seaside in the outlying districts: and those folk will only pay to see big stars and big shows they’ve heard of.

There’s no point in being sniffy about this, as I certainly was in my hot-headed youth. “Please try and review the play this time, and not the audience,” said my long-suffering editor on the Financial Times.

And when Chichester does what it does best, cast to the nines — a Somerset Maugham play, for instance, or a J B Priestley or a popular Shakespeare, or Noel Coward — there’s no nicer place to be on a warm summer evening with the sound of ice cubes clinking in the gin and tonics in the foyer.

It is an extraordinary thing, too, that this season sees the Chichester debuts — who’d have ever thought it — of Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre and Howard Davies, respectively directing the Simon Gray, Jo Fiennes in Cyrano and a new play about the Romanov dynasty.

Nunn is using the great Anthony Burgess translation of Cyrano that his old RSC mucker Terry Hands did so beautifully with Derek Jacobi during the RSC’s Barbican tenure, while Nunn is leaving Oklahoma! to small-scale specialist John Doyle on the main stage.

Most tickets have been sold so far, I’m told, for Separate Tables, which is sponsored by Conquest Furniture, appropriately enough — no shortage of chairs in the dining room of the Beauregard private hotel near Bournemouth, then.

Director Philip Franks is using Rattigan’s amended version which makes the old major’s offstage offence one of homosexual soliciting in a cinema, rather than the touching up of young girls in the back stalls. I suppose Chichester’s ready for that sort of thing now, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Will Conquest Furniture be supplying extra pouffes?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.