A Note About The Concrete

By Stephen Joseph. First published in 1965 and republished in 1995 for the Chichester Festival Theatre programme for the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round's tour of A Word From Our Sponsor.

Most people who come to enjoy a play at the Festival Theatre in Chichester know that they owe a good deal of the pleasure to the vision of Leslie Evershed-Martin. Theb project took shape in his mind, and he brought it to completion, in concrete. It is worth looking behind the concrete, behind the vision - and beyond them too.

An immediate inspiration for the Chichester theatre was the Festival Theatre at Stratford (the birthplace of Shakespeare? No.) in Ontario, Canada. Here Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moisewitsch had designed a theatre based on the architectural pattern of the public playhouse in Shakespeare's day, but in modern terms, and for the modern production of Shakespeare's plays. The form of theatre then that lies behind the Chichester plan is what we believe to have been Shakespeare's theatre.

However, the Elizabethan open stage itself seems to have been very similar to the classic theatre of Spain at the time of those tremendous playwrights, Calderon and Lope de Vega. And fundamentally there are remarkable similarities with, on the one hand, the booth stages that have been common all over Europe for whatever part of the last two thousand years the theatre has existed, and on the other hand, those solemn Greek theatres where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were performed (theatres which, much enlarged and rebuilt in stone by the Romans, still make such impressive ruins today).

You may conclude that the Chichester Festival Theatre has a respectable ancestry.

All the same, to build it required great courage. Architectural experience in this sort of theatre was virtually non-existent when the plans were drawn up. And money for the project was not easily found. It is not surprising then that the theatre is by no means perfect. But let us face the fact that very few theatres are perfect, that a theatre (like everything in the world of drama) is ephemeral, subject to the whims of fashion. And we must look not only into the past, as we have just done, but also into the future.

The Chichester theatre has already been put through its paces, and few people can have missed the exciting possibilities it suggests. When the Canadian company paid their visit last year, for instance, or when the National Theatre presented Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of The Sun this stage was used as no other stage in the country has been used - or could be used. Here are clues to indicate that more and more exciting and unusual things are yet to come. Indeed, the Chichester theatre is only a beginning. It offers us innumerable challenges, not only to show what can be done here, but also to discover what can be done in other unusual forms of theatre. We now realise that there are many forms of theatre, that each can be authentic, entertaining and delightful. The historical past is full of ideas and activities to set our modern imaginations to work.

A good way to show our appreciation of this particular enterprise is to encourage more enterprises of equal daring. As we can point proudly back to the forerunners of Chichester, let us also be proud of a future date to point back to Chichester as itself a source of inspiration.

When we can do this, as I believe we soon shall, Leslie Evershed-Martin's brave theatre will truly have earned its place in history.

Copyright of Stephen Joseph. Please do not reproduce without permission. Transcribed by Simon Murgatroyd.