The season has started so early in Chichester that we’re still travelling on the winter timetable out of Victoria Station. But the sudden onset of balmy weather fooled me into wearing a summer jacket.

Luckily I packed a cashmere scarf in my briefcase, which came in handy on the night bus home from Victoria in the small hours.

It had been a pleasant expedition — apart from the play itself, really, a not very dramatic dramatisation of Simon Gray’s final diary volumes through which various stray critics were rootling and chortling on the train down.

That’s the thing about Gray: you want to take a few dips while keeping a casual eye on the overall meandering undergrowth of his supple, self-questioning prose. At any rate, it’s a more pleasurable occupation than sitting through most of his plays. 

First port of call on hitting the town was Kim’s, a gem of a second-hand bookstore handily situated next door to Tesco’s (chocolate supplies replenished for the journey home; just as well, really, as Mark Shenton merrily availed himself of my carbohydrate facilities in exchange for a few wilting grapes and joked that I’d mention his chocaholism in my blog, which I will).

What, then, is so delightful about Chichester, even though it’s a bit like a posh Frinton and redolent of 1950s postcards from places like Eastbourne and Walton-on-the-Naze?

The Roman walls, for a start. The cathedral. There’s a beautiful little park with a chapel, or priory, in the middle of it, where they play cricket. The scent of the sea. The single-storey architecture so that you’re never swamped, even when it’s awful (which it often is). The charming scout hall where they run a really fine art house cinema, and an annual festival. The market cross.

And at the apex, on the brink of a meadow where I noted the installation of football posts for the first time ever, is the Chichester Festival Theatre, looking a bit worn down these days, but the birthplace of our National Theatre in 1962.

I used to be rude about Chichester audiences. I was wrong. They are people who admittedly vote Conservative and drink gin and tonics, but they are also backbone theatregoers, inquisitive, elderly, yes, but hard to please, and star-struck.

Those virtues are ideal material for a theatre critic, which is why, I guess, I was disappoointed by The Last Cigarette. If you didn’t know anything about Simon Gray to start with, why would you be interested in hearing all this stuff about his smoking habit? And why is Felicity Kendal wearing the same clothes as the two male actors and saying such nasty things?

The pill was sugared by my companion, Tony Thorncroft, the former FT arts editor and peerless saleroom correspondent who has upsized in retirement with his wife Val to a judge’s house in the delightful nearby hamlet of Sidlesham.

We had a jolly good pub dinner beforehand, joined by the slightly befuddled Robert Gore-Langton, who’d driven up quickly from Bristol to cover the play for the Sunday Telegraph, their staff critic having deemed the piece unworthy of note. 

We all put the world to rights over prawn kebabs, sheperd’s pie and chips before joining our colleagues in the theatre. En route the terrible news about Natasha Richardson, badly injured in a skiing accident, filtered through, and I was on obituary stand-by.

I just hope director Richard Eyre hadn’t yet heard, as he is very close to the Redgrave family and directed Natasha in the Grace Kelly role in High Society, a not totally successful musical theatre version of the film she illuminated alongside Stephen Rea.
 
Richard was on good first-night behaviour, congratulating Nicholas de Jongh on his play about Gielgud and, even more impressively, greeting Tony fulsomely, which I later deconstructed as a really nice and genuine gesture towards a largely forgotten arts editor  who probably backed him up during his National Theatre years.

The train home entailed a change at Three Bridges, where Shenton and Ian Shuttleworth — who’d been toying with a keyboard, and the smallest computer screen I’ve ever seen, for the most of the trip — decamped for the London Bridge train and I waited, chocolate-free, for a slightly delayed Victoria-bound link.

It was all so enjoyable I can’t wait to repeat it, probably when Diana Rigg and Guy Henry open on the main Chichester stage in Hay Fever in the middle of April.    
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 11:49 am 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.