8 HOTELS By Nicholas Wright
DANIEL EVANS AND KATHY BOURNE PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHAN PERSSON
WELCOME
Welcome to our first world premiere of Festival 2019, Nicholas Wright’s 8 Hotels. Nick’s play Rattigan’s Nijinsky premiered in Festival 2011 as part of the Rattigan centenary celebrations. His many other award-winning plays have graced the National Theatre, the Almeida, Hampstead and the West End, and we are thrilled that he has chosen to return to Chichester to open his latest play. We are also delighted that Richard Eyre – who has worked with Nicholas Wright over many years, including on the Olivier Award-winning Vincent in Brixton and their jointly authored book on 20th century British theatre, Changing Stages – also returns to Chichester to direct. His last production here was the acclaimed revival of The Stepmother in 2017. Richard has assembled an outstanding cast, all making their Chichester debuts. US actor Tory Kittles appears in the UK for the first time; his screen work includes the American
TV series Colony and True Detective and the feature films Dragged Across Concrete and Harriet, while on stage he recently played Bolingbroke in Richard II at The Old Globe, San Diego. Pandora Colin’s credits include Our Town at Regent’s Park, After the Dance at the National and Delicious on TV. Ben Cura’s screen work includes The Royals and Marcella, while Emma Paetz’s television credits include Gentleman Jack, Press and Pennyworth. We warmly welcome them all. The theatre industry is renowned for throwing up intriguing connections. As Nick Wright charts in his fascinating programme note, 8 Hotels was inspired by his own encounter with Uta Hagen. It seems fitting, therefore, to recall that the real life José Ferrer worked at Chichester several times: in 1975 he directed a production of Cyrano de Bergerac, the role for which he himself won both a Tony and an Oscar. We hope you enjoy this performance; and we hope to see you again for our next Minerva premiere, Cordelia Lynn’s Hedda Tesman after Henrik Ibsen.
Executive Director Kathy Bourne
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Artistic Director Daniel Evans
WORLD PREMIERE
Haydn Gwynne Anthony Calf Jonathan Hyde
HEDDA TESMAN By Cordelia Lynn After Henrik Ibsen Cordelia Lynn breathes new life into Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, asking what we inherit, what we endure and how we carry our history. Holly Race Roughan directs this co-production with Headlong and The Lowry, with Haydn Gwynne in the title role.
30 August – 28 September #HeddaTesman
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A U T U M N 2 019
John Simm Dervla Kirwan
MACBETH By William Shakespeare Paul Miller directs John Simm and Dervla Kirwan in this contemporary production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy.
21 September – 26 October #Macbeth
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10 TICKETS FROM
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8 HOTELS By Nicholas Wright
A NOTE ON
‘I am so happy! I am so happy!’ Uta Hagen clasped her arms around herself, delightedly curled up in her chair, almost knocking her head on the tablecloth. It was 1996, the start of the tour of my play Mrs Klein, in which she was playing the title role. She, the director William Carden and I were having dinner after the show in an old, oncegrand, now slightly dusty hotel in San Francisco. Was she happy, I wondered, because the show had gone well that night? Yes, very likely. And she liked long runs, as everyone knew and, besides, she loved touring. But it felt as though something deeper was in the air. It was she who had chosen this hotel: she had made rather a point of it. Was this, I wondered, where she had stayed over 50 years before on that wartime coast-to-coast tour of Othello in which she played Desdemona, her husband José Ferrer JOSÉ FERRER AND PAUL ROBESON, OTHELLO, 1943 IMAGE COURTESY OF BRIDGMAN IMAGES
played Iago and Paul Robeson was the Moor? And what did it mean to her to be there again? That night is where my memory leads me, when I ask myself the origin of this play. I had never been so flattered in my life as when, a year or so before that, William Carden – whom I didn’t know – called me from New York to say that Uta Hagen wanted to do my play. Would I agree to that, he asked? I replied that I had idolised Hagen ever since I’d seen her playing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1963 and that, as far as I was concerned, she could do whatever she wanted. She had created the part on Broadway – it was her ‘signature role’, as people say – and she was unforgettable in it: furious, funny, heartfelt, wounded, unforgiving. We all look different as we get older,
N THE PLAY but I think Uta changed more than most of us. Photographs of her in that wartime Othello show a blonde with the all-American cute good looks of June Allyson or Rosemary Clooney. (Whom, oddly, José Ferrer would later marry, not once but twice.) My memory of her in Virginia Woolf was of a rangy intellectual broad, almost mannish. When I finally met her in New York, in her little studio theatre where my play was being tried out, she was 77: gaunt and aquiline – ‘eagle-like’ – with burning energy and a warm voice that decades of smoking had touched with gravel. From time to time one caught a hint of a German accent: ‘ex-OWSsted’ for ‘exhausted’. Or was that the character taking over? She was still a magnificent actress and she was feisty. ‘Oh, Uta’, said one of the other actresses, rather nervously, ‘I’m leaving a little pause there. I hope it’s okay with you?’
Uta replied with spirit. ‘Sure, sweetie, you leave that pause and I’ll walk right off the stage because there won’t be a damn thing to keep me on it.’ Robeson had first played Othello in 1930, in London during his and his wife’s long, long stay in Britain. It was a fertile time for him: he starred onstage in Show Boat, he made some great recordings and some mediocre films, he became celebrated for his charm and looks, he was taken up by high society and he earned a fabulous amount of money. Britain was important to him for another reason: it was where his political awakening took place. He made an alliance with the struggling Welsh miners, whose love of song struck a chord in his heart. And through meeting African exiles like the future Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, the future Kenyan President Jomo