Now you, too, can be part of the history of CFT. It’s where the National Theatre company was formed while waiting for its new home on London’s South Bank to be ready it’s where some of the most important contemporary writing has been showcased – from Lucy Prebble’s Enron to David Hare’s South Downs it’s where careers have been made and confirmed. Since then, the roll call of those who’ve played to Chichester reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of contemporary theatre and film – Ian McKellen, Lauren Bacall, Sam Mendes, Kathleen Turner, Stephen Fry, Derek Jacobi, Joseph Fiennes, John Gielgud, Diana Rigg, just a handful of the world-class actors and actresses who have walked the stage at CFT over the past fifty years. Then the house lights went down and the opening words of John Fletcher’s The Chances were spoken. And built against all the odds in parkland just outside a small cathedral city in West Sussex.Īt seven o’clock, everyone stood for the National Anthem. No one had ever seen a theatre like it – an ‘impossible theatre’, strikingly modern, concrete and glass, with a vast thrust stage sticking out into the auditorium. At four minutes to seven on the evening of Tuesday 3rd July 1962, the voice of Laurence Olivier boomed through the foyer of Chichester Festival Theatre asking the first-night audience to take their seats.
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