Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? | CFT | Festival 2023

Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

By Adrienne Kennedy and Adam P. Kennedy

Justin Audibert and Kathy Bourne Photograph by Peter Flude

Festival 2023 Welcome to this performance of Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

It is a real privilege to be presenting the UK premiere of a play written by the unique and ground-breaking American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, who achieved her Broadway debut last year at the age of 91.

Written in collaboration with her son Adam P. Kennedy, Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? is the remarkable true story of her attempt to adapt John Lennon’s book for the National Theatre in the 1960s. It’s a play that is particularly apposite for Chichester Festival Theatre, since it was here that Laurence Olivier established the company that was to become the core of the National Theatre at its first home, The Old Vic. It’s intriguing to speculate that had things gone differently, Adrienne’s play may even have made an appearance here in the 1960s.

We are delighted to welcome Rakie Ayola who is making her Chichester debut in the role of Adrienne. Winner of a BAFTA

Best Supporting Actress Award for her role in TV drama Anthony, Rakie’s many leading television roles also include The Pact, Grace, Shetland, No Offence and Holby City. Her recent theatre work includes On Bear Ridge for National Theatre Wales/ Royal Court, for which she won the Black British Theatre Award for Best Actress.

We also welcome director Diyan Zora and actor Jack Benjamin, who are working at Chichester for the first time too.

There are three more premieres to come in the Minerva this season: the musical Rock Follies, based on the iconic 1970s TV series; Deborah Frances-White’s explosive new comedy Never Have I Ever; and a gripping political drama from Guardian investigative reporter Harry Davies, The Inquiry.

We hope to see you for those too, and that you enjoy today’s performance.

Justin Audibert Artistic Director Designate

Kathy Bourne Executive Director

Rock Follies Based on the television series written by Howard Schuman Book by Chloë Moss Songs by Howard Schuman and Andy Mackay With songs from the ground-breaking 1970s TV series, this punchy new musical is a rousing, riotous rollercoaster of woman power!

Dominic Cooke directs a cast including Carly Bawden, Samuel Barnett, Angela Marie Hurst and Zizi Strallen.

Minerva Theatre 24 July – 26 August Tickets from £10 Book at cft.org.uk Songs used by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing.

Never Have I Ever

By Deborah Frances-White

Minerva Theatre 1 – 30 September Tickets from £10 Book at cft.org.uk

Alexandra Roach, Greg Wise and Susan Wokoma in an explosive, savagely funny first play by comedian, screenwriter and host of the global hit podcast The Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, directed by Emma Butler.

Festival Fridays Every Friday, a group of 9 – 10 yearolds from local primary schools across the Chichester district arrive at the Festival Theatre. They are children who are identified as struggling with formal education and might therefore benefit from a programme of creative activities working with specialist arts practitioners.

Handpicked by their headteachers, the ‘Festival Fridays’ programme is designed to re-engage these children by offering a creative environment which contrasts with their formal school setting, crucially before the transition to secondary education at age 11. This vibrant and practical approach allows them to explore skills that develop their literacy, social development, confidence, self-esteem and well-being.

We identified the children who were going to take part in the project as those who would really benefit from an opportunity like this. For example, one has an EHCP for ADHD. They try

incredibly hard with learning but are significantly behind in all areas that require them to write and record any responses. They are incredibly articulate and have a brilliant mind – particularly for science and technical areas of the curriculum – but a busy classroom can be a very difficult place for them to navigate. We knew we wanted to provide an opportunity for them to build selfesteem and belief in themselves, and this seemed to be perfect. – School leader Unique amongst theatres across England, the programme was devised after consultation with teachers and senior leaders at Sussex schools and piloted during 2019-20. Following positive feedback, a new cohort of pupils was welcomed for the 2021-22 academic year, with additional workshops during the summer holidays, led by freelance facilitators and CFT staff. The day starts with a healthy breakfast and then lunch, part-provided through a partnership with local food reclamation charity UK Harvest,

before launching into activities from storytelling, script work and prop-making to costume design and movement.

Pupils also see family-friendly shows such as Pinocchio.

My favourite thing about Festival Fridays is that we had amazing opportunities to do stuff like acting and the performance that we have been working so hard on. I hope that my hard work has paid off. I hope that it has meant a lot for my mum. - Participant For the children taking part in the 2021/22 programme, the year culminated in a remarkable performance in the Minerva by the participants, who had not only come up with ideas for the content – which included drama, dance and storytelling (plus a hilarious filmed pastiche of professional theatre roles, from marketing to make-up) – but designed and created a set. The invited audience of families, teachers, observers and staff were bowled over.

What a finale! The children were absolute stars and I was heart-burstingly proud of the performance, as was their Headteacher. Their confidence, dedication, creativity, skill and energy in the show is testimony to your team’s efforts of encouragement, support and inspiration. - Teacher All the Festival Fridays children receive invitations to join Chichester Festival Youth Theatre workshops, with bursary places ensuring no financial barrier, to encourage continued engagement between pupils, their families and the Theatre.

It’s absolutely amazing they can continue on this journey with CFT after the project and building on that confidence gained so far. We are incredibly grateful for this project, and how much it has changed their life. - Parent

From cracking cakes and brilliant barista coffee to delicious dining in The Brasserie, we have plenty of options to keep you, your family and friends feeling full and happy.

Meet us for drinks

Fancy yourself as a gin connoisseur? You'll be delighted by our extensive menu in the Minerva Bar. Why not treat yourself to one of our promotional gins available at just £4* for the run of Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

But if gin's not your thing, don’t worry – we also have a wide range of local ales, lagers, wines and other spirits.

*gin only, mixers on top

Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

By Adrienne Kennedy and Adam P. Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy: shapeshifter In her tenth decade, the playwright is still full of giddy, nervous energy, her moods and memories changing as fast as the tonal jump-cuts in her plays

Adrienne Kennedy overlooking the Hudson River Photo courtesy of Adrienne Kennedy

The following is an edited version of an article by Scott Brown, first published in The New York Times Style Magazine, 2 December 2022.

The playwright Adrienne Kennedy will make her Broadway debut this month at the age of 91, with Ohio State Murders (1992), a play she tried for years to commit to paper.

‘I couldn’t do it,’ she recalls. It was 1989, and she’d been commissioned by the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland, her hometown, to write about her experience as an undergraduate, decades ago, at Ohio State University. She was about to return her advance. And then, she says, ‘I just happened to be in the earthquake.’

Kennedy has a winking sense of humor that might seem incongruous with her body of work.

Small and unassuming – she’s 5 foot 1 – with a voice that evokes the singsong politesse of Hollywood’s golden age, Kennedy has a winking sense of humor that might seem incongruous with her body of work, which is often described as dark, difficult and abstract. (In 2018, the New Yorker critic Hilton Als called her oeuvre ‘a long and startling fugue, composed of language that is impactful and impacted but ever-moving, ever-shifting.’) Kennedy herself is a shapeshifter: in her 10th decade, she’s still full of giddy, nervous energy, her moods and memories changing as fast as the tonal jump-cuts in her plays. On this October morning, she delivers ‘I just happened to be in the earthquake’ with the rhythm of ‘I just happened to be in the neighborhood.’ A moment from now, she’ll recall the way Ginger Rogers wore her hair in Kitty Foyle, the 1940 melodrama that was one of her mother’s favorite films; earlier, she was mooning over Frank Sinatra in Higher and Higher (1944): ‘I still want to marry Frank Sinatra,’ she says, sitting amid various curios – a bust of Caesar, a West African djembe drum – in her 61-year-old writer son Adam’s home in Williamsburg, Va., where she’s lived for the past decade, along with his wife, Renee, and their four children.

‘It doesn’t go away. Why? Why is that?’

Since her theatrical debut in 1964, Kennedy has addressed the heart- and head sickness of racism, the confusion of sex and gender and the illusion of the self with incantatory paradoxes, visceral symbols, sidelong pop-culture references and violent contradictions.

Since her theatrical debut with Funnyhouse of a Negro Off Broadway in 1964, at 32, Kennedy has addressed the heart- and head sickness of racism, the confusion of sex and gender and the illusion of the self with incantatory paradoxes, visceral symbols, sidelong pop-culture references and violent contradictions.

Funnyhouse, the first of more than 20 plays she’s written over six decades, is set inside the collapsing consciousness of a young Black woman, Negro Sarah, struggling with self-division and battling selfdestruction. […]

This, in the midst of America’s civil rights movement, was Kennedy’s answer to the

Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Paul Foster, Kenneth Pressman, Lee Kalcheim, Adrienne Kennedy, Lawrence Osgood, 1965 Photo courtesy of Adrienne Kennedy

corrosion of racism: grotesquerie, absurdity, horror and heart, layered with rapid transitions and discursions. The play ‘was so controversial,’ she says now. ‘Certain people thought it was just perfect: That’s what kept it alive. Other people thought that I took drugs, that I hated Black people, [that] I hated white people.’ That slippery dramatic style made the playwright sui generis for over a half-century; her earthquake reference feels like the kind of dry joke you’d find in one of her plays. Except it’s not rhetorical: Kennedy really was in the deadly Loma Prieta earthquake, which destroyed part of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in 1989.

Then 58, she was teaching playwriting at

Stanford, where she hid in a closet and thought she was going to die. Over the days that followed, navigating the Palo Alto campus amid aftershocks, Kennedy passed sorority row and the university’s Lake Lagunita. They both reminded her of Ohio State. Suddenly, it was as if her alma mater had returned to her, with all the hidden traps and secret deadfalls it held for its few students of color. (When she matriculated in 1949, she says, fewer than 250 of the school’s 20,000 or so students were Black, which is consistent with other estimates from the time, although the school didn’t measure racial demographics back then.) […]

John Morning, among many others. At school, Kennedy won prizes, became class president – and at one point, she says, saved a white student’s life after he used a racial slur against a Black classmate.

But she didn’t feel truly othered until she attended college in nearby Columbus, where the white girls in her dorm made their contempt for their Black classmates clear and the professors ‘didn’t see us as people,’ she says. Once, after she’d turned in an essay on George Bernard Shaw, a professor kept her after class to accuse her of plagiarism: ‘It was inconceivable to him that this tiny [Black] girl in a pink sweater could write.’

Once, after she’d turned in an essay on George Bernard Shaw, a professor kept her after class to accuse her of plagiarism: ‘It was inconceivable to him that this tiny [Black] girl in a pink sweater could write.’

Kennedy’s journey began in wartime Cleveland, where she was raised by an exacting schoolteacher (Etta’s daily exhortation, Kennedy says, was ‘don’t you let those little white kids do better than you’) and C.W., a Morehouse man who headed the local branch of the Y.M.C.A. and became a fulcrum of the Black community.

The Hawkins’ neighborhood, Glenville – full of ambitious European immigrants fleeing Hitler and middle-class Southern Blacks fleeing Jim Crow – produced the creators of the first Superman comic (1938), the Inherit the Wind (1955) co-writer Jerome Lawrence and the celebrated mid-century printmaker

Her references and obsessions have been the same since the beginning: Old Hollywood, the Greek tragedies and the turnof-the-20th-century Spanish writer Federico García Lorca.

Ohio State was discouraging for the high-achieving student but perversely nourishing to the young artist. It’s also where she met her husband – Joseph Kennedy, five years her senior, who would later help establish the Africa development non-profit Africare – with whom she moved to Manhattan a few years after graduation. There, she balanced writing and motherhood: she and Joseph had two sons, Adam and Joseph Jr., now a 68-yearold musician, and after they divorced in 1966, they remained close until her husband’s death two years ago. It was while accompanying him on a work trip to Ghana in 1960 that the fever dream of Funnyhouse came to her. When she returned to America, she used a draft of it to apply to Edward Albee’s playwriting workshop at New York’s Circle in the Square Theater and was accepted. Two years later, Albee

Above: National Theatre poster including In His Own Write Image courtesy of National Theatre Archive Opposite: Adrienne Kennedy with her son, Adam, New York 1969 Photo by Jack Robinson / Hulton Archive /Getty Images

produced the first staging of Funnyhouse himself at a small theater downtown.

With Albee’s imprimatur, she became an immediate sensation. Kennedy was invited to join the Actors Studio, then run

by Lee Strasberg, and she and John Lennon discussed collaborating on a stage adaptation of his 1964 nonsense book, In His Own Write. (The dissolution of their would-be partnership is chronicled in her 2008 bio-play, Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?, co-written with Adam, who remembers meeting the rock star as a child.)

She won her first Obie Award in 1964, for Funnyhouse, sharing the spotlight with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), author of the landmark play Dutchman, which also won an Obie that year, and the founding father of the Black Arts Movement, the famous organization comprising a polymathic group of politically motivated African American artists. The B.A.M. members, who were overwhelmingly male, were known for making confrontational work; they and their acolytes viewed hers – insistently introspective, often self-lacerating – with suspicion. To some, her output was ‘apparently less overtly

connected to “the struggle”,’ says Werner Sollors, an African American studies professor at Harvard. But Kennedy, who says, ‘It does not interest me to summarize the state of any of the arts,’ has always drawn on influences less political and more personal, notably her own childhood memories and the treacherous persistence of the past. Her references and obsessions have been the same since the beginning: Old Hollywood, the Greek tragedies and the turn-of-the-20th-century Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whose Blood Wedding, a formative work for her, lasted less than a month on Broadway in 1935.

It bothered some in the movement, Kennedy still suspects, that ‘this girl’ – here, a quick cut to anger, as she channels the belittling voice of her detractors – was getting attention for writing ugly things that weren’t about pride or uplift or the politics of the moment. ‘A big tension that merits mention is her relationship to Blackness,’ says the playwright and actor Eisa Davis, who studied under Kennedy in the early ’90s. ‘She’s very unsparing about revealing her own inner workings, and the illness of what racism does to a psyche.’ […]

After being studied, interpreted and decrypted, ‘I came to see myself differently,’ she says, which fueled both her writing and academic career for subsequent decades.

For years, it seemed, no one could quite keep up. In 1969, after she had an Off Off Broadway hit at La MaMa called A Rat’s Mass – about two half-rodent siblings who long for a white baby – she began to feel misunderstood by the culture and its gatekeepers: ‘Adrienne Kennedy, she’s crazy,’ was how she read the response to Cities in Bezique, a wild Surrealist diptych about sexual assault that was her second major production. Some ‘people walked out,’ Kennedy says. ‘So I really didn’t like the theater, not at all.’ It was even worse after the American playwright Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf made it to Broadway in 1976, when Kennedy’s own work was hardly being produced. ‘I felt left behind,’ she wrote in an email. ‘I knew my time had passed.’ She’s had just one major New York production in the past decade: He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, a well-reviewed play about an interracial relationship in the South that she completed at 86, which premiered in 2018 at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

But, as audiences drifted, the era’s progressive academics increasingly responded to her fractal approach. After being studied, interpreted and decrypted, ‘I came to see myself differently,’ she says, which fueled both her writing and academic career for subsequent decades. ‘Adrienne was embraced by scholars,’ says Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian and literary critic, ‘almost exactly [at the time] when feminist and post-structural writers and critics were turning to [Zora Neale] Hurston’s rich experiments in Black Modernism to explore the contours

of Black postmodernism.’ Universities began offering her jobs; after some four decades teaching playwriting at Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Berkeley, she’s remained close with dozens of her former students (myself included). ‘She’s just such a writer, in any form,’ says the actor Natalie Portman. Even Kennedy’s emails are disobedient. A restless correspondent, she’s known to send early morning messages with punctuation that conjure a voice and style unambiguously her own: I. Used yellow pads. For. Years. And years I like IPAD because it reminds me of My. Old typewriter But honest Scott All the dots are errors Successive generations of playwrights – particularly Black ones – have picked up on that unique, uncompromising voice. The actor and stage docudramatist Anna Deavere Smith, 72, says she was forever changed by Kennedy’s 1976 anti-pastiche A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White – in which white Hollywood icons channel a Black woman’s family trauma – directed by Joseph Chaikin at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976.

‘In those personae of white movie stars, she’s injecting a Black narrative,’ she says.

‘What’s important there is how she handled identity: It’s not all meshed together.

That was, for me, a groundbreaking thing to witness.’ She credits the playwright with freeing her from the constraints of naturalism and linearity: ‘The world is a fragmented place... it’s not beginning, middle, end. I was so happy to have that verified for me.’

While Smith was able to see a live production, many others encountered Kennedy’s work mostly on the page.

That’s how she became a ‘waymaker,’ says Suzan-Lori Parks, 59, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog (2001) is also being revived by Leon on Broadway this season. ‘This world wants certain kinds of folk spoken about in certain ways,’ she says.

‘The marketplace doesn’t want us getting too deep.’ And yet Kennedy remains a

lodestar for a rising generation of Black absurdists – among them 33-year-old Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play, 2018), 37-yearold Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon, 2014) and Jackie Sibblies Drury (whose 2018 Fairview won a Pulitzer) – all of whose work seems more influenced by her anarchic collages and genre mash-ups than by, say, Lorraine Hansberry’s realism or August Wilson’s expressionism. Harris first read Funnyhouse in his Virginia high school’s rehearsal room. He remembers thinking: ‘“A play can look like this? A play can sound like this?” I’d seen Buñuel, I’d read Beckett, but I’d never seen those influences applied to a Black person [in a play].’ A few years later, he mounted a production of Movie Star in his college dorm room. ‘Her great champions were always there,’ he says, ‘but not in the seats of power.’ […]

‘I’ve been around a long time. Playwrights aren’t icons.’

Kennedy mostly stays at home these days and, this late in life, doesn’t expect the recognition she’s been denied. (She won’t even allow herself to be photographed.)

‘I’ve been around a long time,’ she tells me.

‘Playwrights aren’t icons.’ It makes me think of some advice she’d sent me years ago, after I’d had a little success in the theater: You. Have. Done. The work.

Pull. Away. From the scene. soon as you Can. Crowds of people can. Kill you.

From The New York Times. © 2022 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Adrienne Kennedy was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame for ‘Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater’ in 2018; and in 2021, she received the Dramatists Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal; and this year, she received a Special Citation from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle for Lifetime Achievement.

Adrienne Kennedy New York Drama Critics’ Circle Special Citation Image courtesy of Adrienne Kennedy

As

Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

A True Story of London in the 1960s

By Adrienne Kennedy and Adam P. Kennedy Cast Adrienne Kennedy Adam Kennedy

Rakie Ayola Jack Benjamin

There is no interval.

Following the production, after a 20-minute break, a short film will be screened on the background to the play.

This film was made by CFT’s Digital Department.

UK premiere performance of Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 16 June 2023.

Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd on behalf of Samuel French Ltd. concordtheatricals.co.uk The videotaping or making of electronic or other audio and/or visual recordings or streams of this production is strictly prohibited, a violation of United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Director Designer Lighting Designer Composer Sound Designer Video Designer Movement & Assistant Director Casting Director Voice & Dialect Coach

Diyan Zora Anisha Fields Joshua Gadsby Robert Sword George Dennis Hayley Egan Georgina Makhubele Lotte Hines CDG Shereen Ibrahim

Production Manager Costume Supervisor Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Supervisor

Lucy Guyver Helen Flower Shelley Gray

Company Stage Manager Deputy Stage Manager

Francesca Finney Olivia Roberts

Production credits: Additional composition by Jack Benjamin; Set built by Custom Aspect; Production carpenter Jon Barnes; Lighting hires by Encore; Sound and Video Hires by Stage Sound Services; Video engineers Dan Trenchard, David Kennedy and Edward Aspinall; Video Programmer Mollie Tuttle; Rehearsal room Jerwood Space.

With thanks to Gina Medcalf, Allegra Huston, Olivette Cole-Wilson, Shari A. Jessie.

Thanks to all those who contributed to the digital insight film: Adrienne Kennedy, Adam P. Kennedy, Renee Kennedy and Canaan Kennedy; Freddie Hill and Graded Films; National Theatre Archive.

Rehearsal and production photographs The Other Richard Programme Associate Fiona Richards Programme design Davina Chung Cover image Bob King Creative, photograph Seamus Ryan Supported by Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? Supporters Circle: Penny Linnett, Howard M Thompson, Hugh & Clare Twiss, and all those who wish to remain anonymous.

Sponsored by

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Cast Biographies

Rakie Ayola

Rakie Ayola Adrienne Kennedy Theatre includes Mrs Lyall in The Glow (Royal Court); Noni in On Bear Ridge (National Theatre Wales/Royal Court: Black British Theatre Award for Best Female Actor in a Play); Vivien in Strange Fruit, Hannah in The Rest of Your Life (Bush Theatre); Grace in Leave to Remain (Lyric Hammersmith); Modupe in The Half God of Rainfall (Kiln Theatre: BBTA Best Female Actor in a Play nomination); Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Palace Theatre); Goneril in King Lear (Royal Exchange/Talawa); M/Voice in Crave/4.48 Psychosis (Sheffield Crucible); Paulina in The Winter’s Tale (RSC/ national tour); Siobhan/Narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (NT at Apollo Theatre); Elizabeth in The Next Room (Theatre Royal Bath); Pargeia in

Welcome to Thebes (National Theatre); Olivia in Twelfth Night (Bristol Old Vic); Dido in Dido Queen of Carthage (Globe Theatre); Tonya in King Hedley II (Tricycle); Ophelia in Hamlet, Viola in Twelfth Night (Birmingham Rep).

Television includes Hidden Hand, Kaos, The Pact (Royal Television Society Cymru Drama Performance nomination), Grace, Alex Rider, Anthony (BAFTA Best Supporting Actress Award, RTS NW Best Performance in a Drama nomination, Edinburgh TV Festival Best TV Actor in a Drama nomination), Noughts and Crosses, Shetland, Brexit: The Uncivil War, Flowers, No Offence, Vera, Under Milk Wood, Midsomer Murders, Code of a Killer, Black Mirror, Silent Witness, Stella, My Almost Famous Family, Doctor Who, Holby City, Sea of Souls, Canterbury Tales, Being April.

Films include Been So Long, Dredd, Now is Good, Sahara, The I Inside, The Secret Laughter of Woman, Great Moments in Aviation.

Audio Plays include Below, Moominland Midwinter, On a Lost Highway, The King Must Die, Foursome, Three Strong Women.

Jack Benjamin Adam Kennedy Jack Benjamin is an actor, writer and musician.

Theatre work includes To Kill a Mockingbird (Gielgud Theatre, West End) and shows at the Royal Court Theatre and Leeds Playhouse.

Television includes EastEnders and Mr Selfridge.

As a writer and composer, he has recently completed a play with Oxford Playhouse, and is developing a show with Polka Theatre as one of their ‘PolkaLab’ associate artists.

He trained as an actor at Drama Studio London where he was a winner of the Laurence Olivier Bursary Award.

Jack Benjamin

Danny Mac Peter Forbes

Rakie Ayola Jack Benjamin Hayley Egan Jack Benjamin Georgina Makhubele

Diyan Zora Georgina Makhubele Jack Benjamin Olivia Roberts Diyan Zora Hayley Egan Rakie Ayola

Creative Team George Dennis Sound Designer Previously at Chichester The Southbury Child (also Bridge Theatre), The Norman Conquests (Festival Theatre), Hedda Tesman and The Deep Blue Sea (Minerva Theatre), Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (Minerva Theatre & Spiegeltent).

Theatre includes Lemons x 5, The Seagull, The Homecoming (Olivier Award nomination for Best Sound Design), The Importance of Being Earnest, A Slight Ache/ The Dumb Waiter, The Lover/The Collection, One for the Road/A New World Order/ Mountain Language/Ashes to Ashes, The Windsors: Endgame (West End); Blues for an Alabama Sky, Nine Night (also West End), An Octoroon (also Orange Tree) (National Theatre); Straight Line Crazy (also New York), The Southbury Child, Two Ladies, A Very Very Very Dark Matter (Bridge Theatre); Further Than The Furthest Thing,

The Company

The Island (Young Vic); Sweat (Donmar Warehouse/West End); The Duchess of Malfi, Three Sisters (Almeida Theatre); Venice Preserved (Royal Shakespeare Company); Glee & Me (Royal Exchange); Talent, Frost/Nixon, Tribes (Crucible Theatre); The Mountaintop (Young Vic/Royal Exchange/UK Tour); An Unfinished Man (Yard Theatre); Hedda Tesman, Richard III, Spring Awakening (Headlong); Much Ado About Nothing, Imogen, The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare’s Globe); Harrogate, Fireworks, Liberian Girl (Royal Court); Guards at the Taj, Visitors (Bush Theatre); Killer (Off-West End Award for Best Sound Design), The Pitchfork Disney (Shoreditch Town Hall, co-designed with Ben and Max Ringham); Faces in the Crowd, The Convert, In the Night Time, Eclipsed (Gate Theatre); Mary Stuart, The Beacon (Staatstheater Stuttgart).

Hayley Egan Video Designer Theatre includes Tomorrow Gala (The Old Vic); Pijin (Theatr Genedlaethol/Theatr Iolo); Ruination (Lost Dog/Royal Ballet); The Handmaid’s Tale (Royal Danish Opera, Associate); The Boy With Two Hearts (Wales Millenium Centre/National Theatre); Coppélia (Scottish Ballet, Associate); You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History (Barbican); Everyday (Deafinitely Theatre/ New Diorama); The Scandal at Mayerling (Scottish Ballet); Triple Bill: Witch (Royal Academy of Music); A Tale of Two Cities (Lost Dog, Associate); The Child in the Snow (Wilton’s Music Hall); Litvinenko (Grange Park Opera, Associate); The Language of Kindness (Wayward Productions); Don Giovanni (Greek National Opera, Associate); Nixon In China (Scottish Opera, Associate); Orlando (Vienna State Opera, Associate); Julius Cesare in Egypt (Teatro alla Scala,

Associate); I’ll Take You to Mrs Cole!

(Complicité); Dead Man Walking, Fidelio, The Consul (Freedom Season, Welsh National Opera); Idomeneo (Teatro Real, Associate); I’m a Phoenix, Bitch! (Battersea Arts Centre, Associate); Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Wayward Productions/ Complicité, Associate).

Trained at The University of Kent (BA Film Studies). hayleyegan.co.uk Anisha Fields Designer Theatre designs include The Limit (Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre); Squirrel (Unicorn); Walworth Farce (Southwark Playhouse Elephant); Blackout Songs (Hampstead Theatre); Owl at Home (Theatr Iolo); Alice in Wonderland (Mercury Colchester); Zoombird (R&D; Coventry Capital of Culture); Kes (Bolton Octagon/

Theatre by the Lake); Yellowfin (Southwark Playhouse); Acis and Galatea (Early Opera Company/Buxton International Festival); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Salisbury Playhouse/Tobacco Factory); First Encounters: Merchant of Venice (RSC); I Wish I Was a Mountain, Squirrel (The Egg Theatre Royal Bath/Travelling Light); Beautiful Thing (Tobacco Factory & tour); A View from the Bridge, Macbeth (Tobacco Factory).

As Associate Designer, Camp Siegfried (Old Vic), Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (Sheffield Theatres).

Anisha was the recipient of the Leverhulme Arts Scholarship, resident at the RSC 2018-2019. She was named as one of the Guardian’s 12 theatre stars to watch, and was a finalist for Told by an Idiot’s Naomi Wilkinson Award 2019. She is an Associate Artist at Theatr Iolo.

Trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Joshua Gadsby Lighting Designer Joshua is a lighting designer and codesigner for theatre, opera, dance and live art. He is an associate artist of New Diorama Rakie Ayola

Theatre where he co-designed (with Naomi Kuyck-Cohen) their refreshed public spaces, as well as the concept development and design of NDT Broadgate.

Lighting design includes Our Town (Guildhall); Dance Nation, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Three Sisters, The Sound and the Fury (Royal Central School of Speech & Drama); Gulliver’s Travels (co-designed with Jess Bernberg, Unicorn Theatre); The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Theatre by the Lake); Alice in Wonderland (Mercury Colchester); Who Killed My Father (Tron Theatre, Glasgow); Robin Hood: Legend of the Forgotten Forest (Wardrobe Ensemble at Bristol Old Vic); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Leicester Curve/Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse/ETT); The Cunning Little Vixen (Royal Northern College of Music); Half Life (ARC Stockton/Gulbenkian Canterbury); The Tyler Sisters (Hampstead Downstairs); Messiah Part 1 (Little Orchestra); A Kettle of Fish (The Yard); 1972: The Future of Sex (Wardrobe Ensemble for ArtsEd); Returning to Haifa (Finborough); The Leftovers (The Unity/The Lowry/Northern Stage/Belgrade Coventry).

As Co-Designer with Naomi Kuyck-

Cohen, The Winston Machine, Trap Street (New Diorama); Extinction Trilogy (Cambridge Junction); We Should Definitely Have More Dancing (Oldham Coliseum/ tour); Trainers (Gate).

He was Laboratory Associate Lighting Designer at Nuffield Southampton Theatre 2016/17; was shortlisted for a 2017 Stage Debut Award for Design; and in 2019 was awarded a bursary from MGCfutures.

Graduated from the RCSSD/University of London with First Class Honours in BA Theatre Practice: Theatre Lighting Design.

Lotte Hines CDG Casting Director Previously at Chichester, The Vortex (Festival Theatre).

Lotte worked at the Royal Court Theatre as Casting Associate 2008-2012 and then as Deputy Casting Director 2012-2014.

Theatre as Casting Director includes Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Lyric Hammersmith/Sheffield Crucible/Playful Productions); Let The Right One In, Nora: A Doll’s House, The Mountaintop, Glee & Me (Royal Exchange Manchester); Closer, Jack and The Beanstalk (Lyric Hammersmith); Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Palace Theatre/Sonia Friedman Productions); The Forest (Hampstead Theatre); Ivan and the Dogs, Things of Dry Hours, La Musica, Dirty Butterfly, The Island (Young Vic); The Dark (Oval House & UK tour); Hole (Royal Court); The Wolves (Theatre Royal Stratford East); Meek, Junkyard, Boys Will Be Boys, The Glass Menagerie, The Absence of War, Medea (Headlong); As You Like It, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre); The Barbershop Chronicles (NT/Fuel/WYP US tour); Elephant (Birmingham Rep); People, Places and Things (National Theatre/Headlong); Speech and Debate (Trafalgar Studios); The Iliad, The Weir (Lyceum Edinburgh); Brenda (HighTide/The Yard); Pride and Prejudice (Sheffield Crucible); Another Place (Theatre Royal Plymouth); Pests (Clean Break/Royal Court); We Are Proud to Present (Bush Theatre); The Little Mermaid (Bristol Old Vic); Pieces of Vincent (Arcola). As Casting

Associate The Seagull (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre); Tipping the Velvet (Lyric Hammersmith/Royal Lyceum Edinburgh); Bull (Sheffield Crucible); as Casting Assistant Hamlet (Barbican); A View from the Bridge (Young Vic).

Television and film includes Casting Director for the shorts Influencer, CLA’AM, Above, digital dramas Data, Unprecedented and Casting Associate for Lockwood & Co, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Shereen Ibrahim Voice & Dialect Coach Previously at Chichester, Dialect Coach for Our Generation (Minerva Theatre, also National Theatre).

For the National Theatre, company voice work includes Dear England, Hamlet, The Crucible, Jack Absolute Flies Again and The Father and the Assassin; dialect work includes Standing at the Sky’s Edge, The Father and the Assassin, All of Us. Other theatre credits include Richard III (Liverpool Playhouse & The Rose Kingston); Brilliant Jerks (Southwark Playhouse).

Television dialect work includes Sisters.

As an actor, theatre work includes The Black Album and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (National Theatre), Fireworks (Royal Court), Temple (Donmar Warehouse); television includes Conversations with Friends, Salisbury Poisonings and The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself; films include Britz.

Trained as a voice and dialect coach at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and as an actor at RADA. Adam P. Kennedy Writer Adam P. Kennedy is a journalist, writer, and publisher. He was born in Rome, Italy, and grew up in New York City and London, England. He attended Manhattan Country School and Riverdale Country School and graduated from Antioch College with a double major in Soviet Studies and Journalism. Adam has travelled extensively throughout Africa and Europe spanning 50 years.

He created the television shows Africa/ USA: The Connection and The World Connection, “Edu-tainment” programmes for teens that aired on network television and PBS. Signature Theatre Co. produced his autobiographical play Sleep Deprivation Chamber, co-authored with his mother, playwright Adrienne Kennedy and received an Obie Award for Best New American Play in 1995/96.

He is the founder and CEO of Chronicling Greatness, a company dedicated to profiling pioneers and veterans. He has interviewed over 200 veterans from World War II to Vietnam about their lives and service.

Adam co-wrote Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? with his mother Adrienne Kennedy, which launched the Public Lab Series at the Public Theatre in New York City.

The play is published by Samuel French, Inc. Kennedy is co-host of America’s Place

Rakie Ayola Jack Benjamin Diyan Zora Hayley Egan

in the World podcast with General Tony Zinni, a retired four-star United States Marine Corps General and former US special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian authority.

Kennedy is the president and founder of the nonprofit The Black Experience. He conducts in-depth interviews with highly influential leaders to inspire and educate young people. TBE is partnered with over 600 schools.

Adrienne Kennedy Writer Award-winning playwright, lecturer, and author Adrienne Kennedy was born in Pittsburgh in 1931 and graduated from Ohio State University. Her plays include Funnyhouse of a Negro, June and Jean in Concert, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. She wrote Ohio State Murders while teaching at Stanford, the passages of the play pouring fourth during

the aftershocks of an earthquake. She is the recipient of an Obie Award for Sleep Deprivation Chamber, co-authored with her son Adam Kennedy.

Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, and a Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, New York University, and University of California at Berkeley, where she was Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer in 1980 and 1986.

In 2008, Ms Kennedy received an Obie Lifetime Achievement Award; in 2018, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame for ‘Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater’; and in 2021, she received the Dramatists Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which noted her ‘indelible and extraordinary impact... not only to the art of playwriting, but to all

of us in the community of American dramatists.’ In 2023, she received a Special Citation from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle for Lifetime Achievement.

Georgina Makhubele Movement & Assistant Director Theatre includes Rock ‘n’ Roll (Guildford School of Acting); The Girl Who Was Very Good At Lying (Edinburgh Fringe/Omnibus Theatre/Jermyn Street Theatre); Song of the Summer (Royal & Derngate); Supernova (Theatre503); Klippies (Young Vic); Hunger (Associate Movement Director, Arcola Theatre); La Belle Hélène (Assistant Movement Director, Blackheath Halls); Cult Clit (National Arts Festival South Africa).

Georgina held a workshop on Physical Storytelling: Mime, Slapstick & Clowning at Cherwell Theatre Company Tell Your Story Festival.

Trained at Institute for Contemporary Music Performance, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Rhodes University.

Robert Sword Composer Previously at Chichester, Arranger for Plenty (Festival Theatre).

Theatre as Composer with Giles Thomas includes Hedda Gabler (Sherman Theatre), Take A Deep Breath and Breathe (Oval House) and Stop Kiss (Leicester Square Theatre); as Composer A Fruitful Season: Keats in Winchester (2Time Theatre), An Evening with Rudyard Kipling (tour); as Composer/Arranger/Performer An Honest Soldier (2Time Theatre/ Winchester Cathedral); as Arranger The Glass Menagerie (Royal Exchange Theatre), An Octoroon (Abbey Theatre), Romeo and Juliet (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre), Equus (Stratford East/ETT/UK tour & West End), Faustus (Headlong/Lyric Hammersmith), Unfathomable Phantasmagoria; as Pianist Playing With The Truth; as String Arranger/Pianist A Walk Into Reverie and In A South Downs Way. Screen credits as Composer, The Way Back, Darling; as Composer with Giles Thomas The Mad Prophet’s Waltz, The Gwynne-Harris Round, The Wonder of Light, Reflection, The Cure, Fur Away, The Sound of London, Blackmark, Aurélia, Roommates, Science Museum: Collider Exhibition. robertswordmusic.com Jack Benjamin

Diyan Zora Director Diyan is a British Iraqi theatre director and writer based in London. As winner of the 2021 Genesis Future Directors Award, she directed Klippies by Jessica Sian at the Young Vic Theatre. Diyan recently formed part of the Bush Theatre›s 2022 Emerging Writers’ Group.

Theatre includes Tom Fool (Orange Tree Theatre); Klippies and Ms Y. (Young Vic); Consent (Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama); Lysistrata (Lyric Theatre Springboard); Gather Ye Rosebuds (Theatre503); Twelfth Night (Cockpit Theatre); Othello (Barons Court Theatre).

As Associate Director: LOVE (& European tour), Faith Hope and Charity (National Theatre); The Ferryman (Gielgud Theatre).

As Assistant Director: Fireworks (Royal Court); Evening at the Talkhouse (National Theatre).

Events

Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

Pre-Show Talk

Backstage Tour

Tuesday 20 June, 5.30pm Join director Diyan Zora for a fascinating insight into how her production came together, with a chance to ask questions of your own. Diyan is in conversation with best-selling author Kate Mosse.

Free but booking is essential.

Saturdays 24 June, 22 & 29 July, 11am Explore behind the scenes in the latest of our 60-minute tours of the Festival Theatre.

Tickets £10

Post-Show Talk Wednesday 28 June Stay after the performance to ask questions, meet company members and discover more about the play.

Hosted by Kate Bassett, CFT Literary Associate.

Free

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Get Creative Whatever your interests or skill-set, there’s something for you in our programme of activities for adults. Everyone’s welcome, so join us and get creative.

Get Into It! Learn new skills and socialise in our termly sessions in Acting, Dancing or Singing each Monday. Can’t make it every week? Try our Drop-Ins and join us when suits you. No experience necessary - everyone is welcome to Get Into it!

Mind, Body, Sing Fun and relaxing, our group singing sessions are open to everyone aged 18+ and are dementia friendly. We believe everyone is musical and there are no wrong notes, so join us and experience the health-giving properties of group singing.

Scan to find out more cft.org.uk/get-creative

Wednesday Company and Friday Company For adults aged 25+ with learning disabilities to develop their artistic skills, meet new people and socialise in a fun and supportive environment.

Wednesday Company takes place at The Capitol in Horsham and Friday Company takes place at St Paul’s Church in Chichester.

Chichester People’s Theatre Our community company work together to devise an original piece of theatre inspired by the work on our stages. The piece is then shared at a public performance.

Join Chichester Festival Youth Theatre “For young people, knowing you can identify as whoever you really think you are is more and more relevant, and CFYT has always felt like a space where you can do that.”

CFYT MEMBER

Every week, CFYT members meet at locations across the county to discover new skills and explore new stories, make friends, build confidence and, most importantly, “laugh until your sides hurt”* (*direct quote from a member).

For ages 5 to 25 we have drama, dance, musical theatre and technical theatre sessions to choose from, as well as groups for young people with additional needs (CFYT Wednesday in Horsham and CFYT Friday in Chichester).

Our weekly sessions take place in locations across West Sussex for you to meet like-minded people and find a space where you can just be yourself!

Find your group across West Sussex and join us!

Scan to find out more

cft.org.uk/CFYT

Light a Spark What’s your first theatre memory?

Was it the buzz as you took your seat, being wowed by the show, the interval ice cream?

We want your first theatre memories to be part of an installation celebrating Chichester Festival Theatre and our new Light a Spark campaign.

Share your memories with us today. cft.org.uk/LightASpark

Light a Spark is fundraising to support magical first theatre experiences for children, young people and families in our communities.

Chichester Festival Theatre is a registered charity. Charity no. 1088552.

Staff Trustees Mark Foster Victoria Illingworth Rear Admiral John Lippiett CB CBE Harry Matovu KC Caro Newling OBE Nick Pasricha Philip Shepherd Stephanie Street Hugh Summers Jean Vianney Cordeiro Tina Webster

Chair

Jack Goodland

LEAP Anastasia Alexandru Helena Berry Rob Bloomfield Zoe Ellis Sally Garner-Gibbons

Literary Associate Casting Associate

Building & Site Services Chris Edwards Maintenance Engineer Lez Gardiner Duty Engineer Daren Rowland Facilities Manager Graeme Smith Duty Engineer

Abbie Hart Amy Hills Dee Howland Kendal Love

Assistant Wardrobe Dresser Wardrobe Manager Senior Costume Assistant Dresser Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Manager Dresser Wardrobe Manager Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Assistant Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Manager

Lilith Mitchener Lucy Olorenshaw Natasha Pawluk Emily Souch Loz Tait Colette Tulley Eloise Wood

Dresser Dresser Wig Daysetter Assistant Wardrobe Head of Costume Wardrobe Maintenance Wig Assistant

Development Jessey Barnes Laura Blake

Heritage & Archive Assistant

Dan Heesem Katie Hennessy

LEAP Co-ordinator Apprenticeship Co-ordinator

Senior Youth & Outreach Manager

Shari A. Jessie Louise Rigglesford

Creative Therapist Senior Community & Outreach Manager

Dale Rooks Abi Rutter

Director of LEAP Youth & Outreach Co-ordinator

Riley Stroud

Cultural Learning & Education Apprentice

Angela Watkins Costume Isabelle Brook Helen Clark Aly Fielden Helen Flower Lysanne Goble Shelley Gray

Fuzz Guthrie Lucy Guyver

Matthew Hawksworth Head of Children & Young People’s Programme Hannah Hogg

Associates Kate Bassett Charlotte Sutton CDG

Youth & Outreach Trainee Heritage & Archive Co-ordinator

LEAP Projects Manager

Marketing, Communications, Digital & Sales Josh Allan Box Office Supervisor Caroline Aston Audience Insight Manager Becky Batten Head of Marketing Laura Bern Marketing Manager Jessica Blake-Lobb Marketing Manager (Corporate) Helen Campbell

Deputy Box Office Manager

Lydia Cassidy

Director of Marketing & Communications

Jay Godwin Lorna Holmes Mollie Kent

Box Office Assistant Box Office Supervisor Box Office Assistant (Casual)

James Mitchell James Morgan Lucinda Morrison Brian Paterson

Box Office Assistant Box Office Manager Head of Press Distribution Co-ordinator

Development Officer Fundraising Consultant

Rachael Pennell Kirsty Peterson Ben Phillips

Julie Field Friends Administrator Sophie Henstridge-Brown Senior Development Manager

Marketing Officer Box Office Assistant Marketing & Press Assistant

Catherine Rankin

Box Office Assistant (Casual)

Jenny Thompson

Social Media & Digital Marketing Officer

Charlotte Stroud Karen Taylor

Development Manager Development Manager (Maternity Leave)

Joanna Walker Megan Wilson

Director of Development Events and Development Officer

Directors Office Justin Audibert

Artistic Director Designate

Kathy Bourne Patricia Key Keshira Aarabi

Executive Director PA to the Directors Projects & Events Co-ordinator

Angela Buckley

Projects & Events Co-ordinator

Sophie Hobson Georgina Rae

Creative Associate Director of Planning & Projects

Julia Smith

Board Support

Finance Alison Baker Payroll & Pensions Officer Sally Cunningham Purchase Ledger Assistant Amanda Hart

Finance & Operations Director

Krissie Harte Katie Palmer

Finance Officer Assistant Management Accountant

Simon Parsonage Amanda Trodd Protozoon Ltd

Finance Director & Company Secretary Management Accountant IT Consultants

Joshua Vine Julia Walter Claire Walters Joanna Wiege Jane Wolf

Box Office Assistant (Casual) Creative Digital Producer Box Office Assistant Box Office Administrator Box Office Assistant

People Paula Biggs Emily Oliver

Head of People Accommodation Co-ordinator

Jenefer Francis Jenny Sherriff

HR Officer Recruitment & HR Administrator

Gillian Watkins

HR Officer

Production Amelia Ferrand-Rook Producer Claire Rundle Production Administrator George Waller Trainee Producer Nicky Wingfield Production Administrator Jeremy Woodhouse Producer Technical Steph Bartle Deputy Head of Lighting James Barnes Stage Crew Victoria Baylis Props Assistant Daisy Vahey Bourne Stage Crew Finley Bradley Technical Theatre Apprentice Serena Christian Leoni Commosioung Sarah Crispin Elise Fairbairn Ross Gardner Sam Garner-Gibbons

Stage Crew Stage Technician Senior Prop Maker Stage Technician Stage Crew Technical Director

Stage Crew & Automation Senior Sound Technician Production Manager Apprentice Lighting Technician Props Store Co-ordinator

Tom Hitchins Head of Stage & Technical Laura Howells Senior Lighting Technician Mike Keniger Head of Sound Andrew Leighton Senior Lighting Technician Finlay Macknay Tito Ruiz Mateo Karl Meier Ian Murphy

Stage Crew Prop Maker Head of Stage Stage & Automation Technician

Charlotte Neville

Head of Props Workshop

Stuart Partrick Neil Rose Anna Setchell James Sharples

Transport & Logistics Deputy Head of Sound Deputy Head of Stage Senior Stage Crew & Rigger

Molly Stammers Senior Lighting Technician Ben Steel Stage Crew Graham Taylor Head of Lighting Dominic Turner Lighting Technician Bogdan Virlan Stage Crew Elliott Wallis Sound Technican Theatre Management Janet Bakose Theatre Manager Judith Bruce-Hay Minerva Supervisor Charlie Gardiner Minerva Supervisor Ben Geering Head of Customer Operations Dan Hill Assistant House Manager Will McGovern Deputy House Manager Sharon Meier PA to Theatre Manager Gabriele Williams Deputy House Manager Caper & Berry Catering Proclean Cleaning Ltd Cleaning Contractor Goldcrest Guarding

Security

Stage Door: Bob Bentley, Janet Bounds, Judith Bruce-Hay, Caroline Hanton, Keiko Iwamoto, Chris Monkton, Sue Welling Ushers: Miranda Allemand, Judith Anderson, Maria Antoniou, Izzy Arnold, Jacob Atkins, Carolyn Atkinson, Brian Baker, Richard Berry, Emily Biro, Gloria Boakes, Alex Bolger, Dennis Brombley, Judith Bruce-Hay, Louisa Chandler, Jo Clark, Gaye Douglas, Stella Dubock, Amanda Duckworth, Clair Edgell, Lexi Finch, Suzanne Ford, Suzanne France, Jessica Frewin-Smith, Nigel Fullbrook, Barry Gamlin, Charlie Gardiner, Jay Godwin, Anna Grindel, Caroline Hanton, Justine Hargraves, Joseph Harrington, Joanne Heather, Marie Innes, Keiko Iwamoto, Flynn Jeffery, Joan Jenkins, Pippa Johnson, Julie Johnstone, Ryan Jones, Jan Jordan, Jon Joshua, Sally Kingsbury, Alexandra Langrish, Judith Marsden, Emily McAlpine, Janette McAlpine, Fiona Methven, Chris Monkton, Ella Morgans, Susan Mulkern, Isabel Owen, Martyn Pedersen, Susy Peel, Kirsty Peterson, Helen Pinn, Barbara Pope, Fleur Sarkissian, Nicola Shaw, Janet Showell, Lorraine Stapley, Sophie Stirzaker, Angela Stodd, Christine Tippen, Charlotte Tregear, Andy Trust, Sue Welling, James Wisker, Donna Wood, Kim Wylam, Jane Yeates We acknowledge the work of those who give so generously of their time as our Volunteer Audio Description Team: Janet Beckett, Tony Clark, Robert Dunn, Geraldine Firmston, Suzanne France, Richard Frost, David Phizackerley, Christopher Todd

Our Supporters 2023 Major Donors Deborah Alun-Jones Robin and Joan Alvarez David and Elizabeth Benson Philip Berry George W. Cameron OBE and Madeleine Cameron Sir William and Lady Castell David and Claire Chitty John and Pat Clayton David and Jane Cobb John and Susan Coldstream Clive and Frances Coward

Trusts and Foundations The Arthur Williams Charitable Trust The Arts Society, Chichester The Bateman Family Charitable Trust The Bernadette Charitable Trust The Dorus Trust The D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust Elizabeth, Lady Cowdray’s Charity Trust Epigoni Trust

Festival Players 1000+ John and Joan Adams Tom Reid and Lindy Ambrose The Earl and Countess of Balfour Sarah and Tony Bolton Ian and Jan Carroll C Casburn and B Buckley CS and M Chadha David Churchill Denise Clatworthy Michael and Jill Cook Lin and Ken Craig

Festival Players 500+ Judy Addison Smith Mr James and Lady Emma Barnard (The Barness Charity Trust) Martin Blackburn Janet Bounds Pat Bowman Jean Campbell Sally Chittleburgh Mr and Mrs Jeremy Chubb Mr Charles Collingwood and Miss Judy Bennett

Yvonne and John Dean Jim Douglas Mrs Veronica J Dukes Melanie Edge Huw Evans Steve and Sheila Evans Val and Richard Evans Sandy and Mark Foster Simon and Luci Eyers Angela and Uri Greenwood Themy Hamilton Lady Heller and the late Sir Michael Heller Liz Juniper Roger Keyworth Vaughan and Sally Lowe Jonathan and Clare Lubran Mrs Sheila Meadows Elizabeth Miles Eileen Norris Jerome and Elizabeth O’Hea Mrs Denise Patterson DL Stuart and Carolyn Popham Dame Patricia Routledge DBE Sophie and David Shalit Simon and Melanie Shaw Greg and Katherine Slay Christine and Dave Smithers Alan and Jackie Stannah Oliver Stocken CBE Howard Thompson Peter and Wendy Usborne Bryan Warnett Ernest Yelf

The Foyle Foundation The G D Charitable Trust Hobhouse Charitable Trust The Mackintosh Foundation The Maurice Marshal Preference Trust Noël Coward Foundation Rotary Club of Chichester Harbour Theatre Artists Fund The Vernon Ellis Foundation Wickens Family Foundation

Deborah Crockford Clive and Kate Dilloway Peter and Ruth Doust Gary Fairhall Mr Nigel Fullbrook George Galazka Robert and Pirjo Gardiner Wendy and John Gehr Marion Gibbs CBE Rachel and Richard Green Ros and Alan Haigh Chris and Carolyn Hughes Melanie J. Johnson John and Jenny Lippiett Sarah Mansell and Tim Bouquet James and Anne McMeehan Roberts Mrs Michael Melluish Celia Merrick Roger and Jackie Morris Jacquie Ogilvie Mr and Mrs Gordon Owen Graham and Sybil Papworth Richard Parkinson and Hamilton McBrien Nick and Jo Pasricha John Pritchard Trust Philip Robinson Nigel and Viv Robson Ros and Ken Rokison David and Linda Skuse Peter and Lucy Snell Julie Sparshatt Richard Staughton and

The de Laszlo Foundation Lady Finch Colin and Carole Fisher Beryl Fleming Terry Frost Stephen J Gill Dr Stuart Hall Rowland and Caroline Hardwick Dennis and Joan Harrison Karen and Paul Johnston Frank and Freda Letch Anthony and Fiona Littlejohn Jim and Marilyn Lush Dr and Mrs Nick Lutte Trevor & Lynne Matthews Tim McDonald Jill and Douglas McGregor Sue and Peter Morgan Mrs Mary Newby Margaret and Martin Overington Jean Plowright Robin Roads Dr David Seager John and Tita Shakeshaft Elizabeth Stern Anne Subba-Row Harry and Shane Thuillier Miss Melanie Tipples Chris and Dorothy Weller Nick and Tarnia Williams

Claire Heath Ian and Alison Warren Angela Wormald

...and to all those who wish to remain anonymous, thank you for your incredible support.

‘Chichester Festival Theatre enriches lives with its work both on and off stage. It is a privilege to be connected in a small way with this inspirational and generous-hearted institution, especially at such a challenging time for everyone in the Arts.’

John and Susan Coldstream, Major Donors and Festival Players

Our Supporters 2023 Principal Partners Platinum Level

Prof. E.F. Juniper and Mrs Jilly Styles Gold Level

Silver Level

Corporate Partners FBG Investment J Leon Group Jones Avens

Montezuma’s Oldham Seals Group Pallant House Gallery

Protozoon William Liley Financial Services Ltd

Why not join us and support the Theatre you love: cft.org.uk/support-us | development.team@cft.org.uk | 01243 812911

The Sound of Music 10 Jul – 3 Sep For a special experience, join us for the charity Summer Gala performance on 28 July Tickets from £10 Book at cft.org.uk

Music by Richard Rodgers Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse Suggested by The Trapp Family Singers

by Maria Augusta Trapp

This summer, join us for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s beloved musical, produced at Chichester for the first time. Gina Beck (South Pacific 2021) returns to play Maria, directed by Adam Penford.

The Sound of Music is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd on behalf of Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization concordtheatricals.co.uk