THIS IS MY FAMILY A musical by Tim Firth
DANIEL EVANS AND KATHY BOURNE PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHAN PERSSON
WELCOME
A very warm welcome to the opening production of Festival 2019. We are delighted to start the season with Tim Firth’s This Is My Family. Tim has been associated with Chichester for over 30 years: from the very start of his career as a playwright with Heartlands in 1988 to a revival of his hugely successful play Neville’s Island in 2014. We couldn’t be happier to be working with him again on this piece which was first staged in Sheffield Theatres’ Studio in 2013. We hope you agree that nurturing award-winning new British musicals and bringing them to a wider audience is thoroughly worthwhile. Especially, perhaps, when the book, music and lyrics have all been written by the same person – a rarity in musical theatre. The cast of six includes James Nesbitt, Clare Burt, Sheila Hancock and Rachel Lumberg. James has won millions of fans and admirers for screen work ranging
from Cold Feet to The Missing, and we’re thrilled that he is making his return to the stage at the Minerva. Clare Burt won Chichester audiences’ hearts last year as the unforgettable Ada Harris in Flowers for Mrs Harris, while Sheila Hancock also makes a hugely welcome return; her remarkable career includes, most recently, the film Edie and TV series Delicious. Rachel Lumberg recently led the UK tour of The Band, also penned by Tim Firth. The outstanding sextet is completed by relative newcomers Kirsty MacLaren and Scott Folan. Festival 2019 encompasses a huge breadth of work. Our summer musical in the Festival Theatre will be the exuberant classic, Oklahoma!; it will be preceded by William Nicholson’s award-winning play Shadowlands, with Hugh Bonneville and Liz White, and David Hare’s explosive drama Plenty, with Rachael Stirling and Rory Keenan. Also, don’t miss Tim Firth in conversation with Kate Mosse on 23 May. Enjoy this performance, and we hope to see you again soon.
Executive Director Kathy Bourne
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Artistic Director Daniel Evans
COMING SOON
Hugh Bonneville Liz White
SHADOWLANDS By William Nicholson Hugh Bonneville plays writer C.S. Lewis in this multi award-winning play about his life-changing relationship with Joy Gresham, played by Liz White, and directed by Rachel Kavanaugh.
26 April – 25 May #Shadowlands
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S U M M E R 2 019
Josie Lawrence Hyoie O’Grady Amara Okereke
OKLAHOMA! Music by Richard Rodgers Book & Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II Based on the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs Original choreography by Agnes de Mille Directed by Jeremy Sams, a love-struck crew of spirited ranchers lead us through the glorious score of this exuberant musical, from Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ to the show-stopper Oklahoma.
15 July – 7 September #OklahomaMusical
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THIS IS MY FAMILY A musical by Tim Firth
HAPPINESS AND HOPE Tim Firth has come full circle. As an undergraduate, he wrote his first play for a theatre company he’d formed with a fellow student, one Sam Mendes. A year or so later, Mendes found himself in charge of a temporary theatre in Chichester, The Tent, and commissioned Tim to write another play, Heartlands. That 1988 Tent season was the blueprint for the Minerva Theatre which opened the following year. Thirty years on, with This Is My Family, Tim Firth has finally arrived back where he started. Not that this is his first work at Chichester, of course: Calendar Girls, which he adapted from his hit film, premiered in the Festival Theatre in 2008, and Neville’s Island was staged (again under canvas in the ‘Theatre in the Park’, while the Festival Theatre was undergoing renovation) in 2014. If all that indicates that the theatrical process can be a long and winding road, the same is true of This Is My Family, Tim’s first solo musical.
‘The mundane can actually be extraordinarily beautiful’ ‘I was trying to write a musical which had a very complicated plot,’ Tim recalls wryly. ‘I sat down with my agent Alan Brodie and some potential producers and told them the story. Sometimes as you talk, you feel it slightly dying in your mouth. Afterwards, I was sitting in the coffee shop with Alan and said, “You know what? If I write this show, I’m going to spend my life telling people why they shouldn’t not come to see it: it’s so complicated and about such a weird thing. What I should do instead is write LEFT: TIM FIRTH RIGHT: THE TENT THEATRE IN THE PARK
something really simple about a family going on holiday.” It was a fortunate choice, since on its debut at Sheffield in 2013, This Is My Family – the touching story of a 13-year-old girl called Nicky who wins a competition to take her fractious family on a dream holiday and chooses a camping trip to try to reunite them again – won the UK Theatre Award for Best Musical. What had appealed to Tim about this apparently simple subject? ‘It’s such an unexpected thing to glorify with a musical – an ordinary family going on holiday’, he acknowledges. ‘The reasons why it worked for me, potentially, was that on the one hand you’ve got this simple, funny idea of a family going on a disastrous holiday, but you’ve also got the idea of there being no such thing as an ordinary family. The mundane can