The Cat and the Canary Adapted by Carl Grose From the play by John Willard
Welcome
Welcome
Welcome to this performance of The Cat and the Canary – and congratulations on being brave enough to come! It’s hard to believe we’re welcoming you to the final production of Festival 2024. The Cat and the Canary, brilliantly adapted by Carl Grose from the original play by John Willard, has the perfect mixture of spooks and belly laughs and thrills to end the season; and there’s nobody better than the genius shape-shifting company Told by an Idiot, and director Paul Hunter, to tell it. As Paul says in this programme, entertainment is central to Told by an Idiot’s mission, and we’re thrilled to be co-producing this deliciously terrifying show with them. The cast includes one of the company’s co-founders, Hayley Carmichael, who last appeared at the Minerva in Home in 2021; we’re delighted to welcome her back as part of the superb ensemble company, some of them also returning to Chichester and others appearing here for the first time. Thank you so much for your support throughout Festival 2024 – Justin’s first season as Artistic Director. None of it would be possible without you. Soon, our Winter season will be in full swing with a huge variety of musicals, drama and new work. We hope you enjoy today’s performance and to see you again soon. Providing you get safely out of Bodmin Moor, of course…
Justin Audibert Artistic Director
Kathy Bourne Executive Director
Kathy Bourne and Justin Audibert Photograph by Peter Flude
Winter Season 2024 – 25 Here comes Winter! Bringing a hugely varied season of the best touring work on offer. Our adaptations of The Other Boleyn Girl and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold were big successes earlier this year, and Winter brings more drama based on popular and award-winning books with Birdsong (pictured above), The Girl on the Train, Never Let Me Go and the hilariously inventive Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). Fans of classic drama will also relish new productions of A Man For All Seasons starring Martin Shaw, and a Rattigan double-bill Summer 1954 with Dame Siân Phillips and Nathaniel Parker. And for those looking for something a bit more alternative and quirky – but always stimulating and entertaining – there’s unmissable new work, from the award-winning Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz to Driftwood from ThickSkin and Pentabus. Plus another chance to see West End musical hit SIX alongside eagerlyawaited new shows such as the Dolly Parton musical Here You Come Again and the 1980s-inspired After the Act.
Check out the full line-up of drama, music,
Magical festive moments At the centre of the Winter season, of course, is Christmas! We’re packaging up magical festive moments for everyone, young and old, to make the season truly sparkle. Created especially for us by Michael Morpurgo, Hey! Christmas Tree will enchant small children and their families; while our brilliant Chichester Festival Youth Theatre will be making everyone’s wishes come true with a magical telling of Cinderella. Santa himself had such a good time in our Grotto last year that he’s bringing his trusty Elves back for another spell-binding workshop (you can also join the Elves at their own Christmas Party on 24 December when Father Christmas is off starting his deliveries around the world). Mistletoe & Melodies is a festive evening combining a sumptuous dinner with Christmas songs performed by West End singers; while Baby Broadway ensures our smallest guests aren’t left out of the party. And it wouldn’t be a real Chichester Christmas without The Band of HM Royal Marines and Chichester Cathedral Choir in our beloved Christmas Concerts.
dance and comedy at cft.org.uk
Provenance Community Sustainability Creating exceptional food to enhance your Festival experience
Our ethos Delicious dishes are only as good as their component parts and community is a key factor for Caper & Berry and CFT. We believe that working with fantastic local producers has huge benefits to local communities and creates better environments.
In our larder Fresh ingredients have been at the centre of Caper & Berry’s ethos since 2004: Ultra Sustainable Suppliers
Chef’s Farms
- Tempus Cured Meats - Charlie’s Smokehouse - Cadd Oxshott Pizza
- Slade Farm Asparagus - Secretts Farm Leaves - Surrey Watercress
Discover more
The Cat and the Canary Adapted by Carl Grose From the play by John Willard
en
Told by an Idiot celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. When you founded the company in 1993, did you have any idea it would still be going strong in 2024? Not at all, we’d have laughed at the notion. Way back then, [actor] Hayley Carmichael, [director] John Wright and myself came together to create a show we wanted to do at Edinburgh, like lots of young theatre makers. I remember standing in the Pleasance Courtyard thinking that whatever happens, even if everyone hates it, at least we can say we did it! The journey we ended up going on was never on our minds. How did you, John and Hayley meet? We were all at what was then Middlesex Polytechnic in the mid 1980s. In many ways it was a conventional drama school training, except John was a tutor who had worked in Paris with Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Paul Hunter
Gaulier, and his teachings were something Hayley and I had never really experienced before. John introduced us to the work of Complicité and we were blown away by this mad, European, circus type of theatre. There was nothing quite like that in Britain at the time. Complicité did a season at the Almeida and even if we couldn’t afford tickets, we’d wait in the bar to meet them. What was your first show? On The Verge of Exploding which was inspired by a couple of pages in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. It was improvised and almost wordless; we called it ‘a clown tragedy’. It had an extraordinary life; we did it in Edinburgh, London twice, and Romania. The year after we did Edinburgh, a South African producer by chance bumped into our producer and asked if there was a script because they wanted to perform it;
That’s ntertainment During rehearsals, we joined Paul Hunter, Artistic Director and co-founder of Told by an Idiot – and the director of The Cat and the Canary – to shine a light on this remarkable company
we didn’t want to write a script and jokily said, “But we’ll come to South Africa and do it!”. So we ended up at the world-famous Market Theatre and were the first British company to tour in post-apartheid South Africa. It was a brilliant start, but we were anxious not to repeat ourselves. What’s the secret of staying together so long? Right from the very beginning, we always went away to work with different people on different things, and then we would return to make work together. And I think that time apart allows you to reflect and come back with new energy, and keep it fresh. We don’t revive things very often. We toyed, in our 30th anniversary year, with revisiting On The Verge of Exploding but we all agreed that the world didn’t really need to see that! Our show about the early life of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel,
Charlie and Stan, which we toured to the Minerva amongst many other places, has stayed with us, on and off, for three years. Have the principles for the company’s existence changed in the intervening decades? I don’t think the ethos has changed. The notion of trying to explore the space between laughter and pain is something we identified very early on. Some might find that a strange place to be, but we find it really creative. It sounds contradictory but we take our comedy very seriously; I’d go as far as to say I’m slightly wary of work that doesn’t contain any comedy at all. If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, that’s a good benchmark! We’ve never had any interest in trying to create reality on stage. We’ve always been of the view that film and TV will do that infinitely better than theatre can; so revelling
in the artifice of performance, and the relationship with the audience which is ever-present and ever-shifting – those things have remained constant. We’ve been wary of trying to identify a style; that shifts and changes a lot. But – we use this word very deliberately – the desire to entertain is very important to us. It’s a word that sometimes people can be a bit sniffy about but I remember seeing an old copy of Brighton Rock in a bookshop in Hastings, and on the cover it said ‘An entertainment by Graham Greene.’ And I thought, again, well if that’s good enough for Graham Greene… It doesn’t mean you can’t be provocative or political, but entertainment is the bottom line. I remember John being interviewed on the radio and someone asked him about all the theories about acting, and he said, ‘There’s only one rule: don’t be boring.’ There’s a great derivation of ‘entertainment’ on Told by an Idiot’s website – from the French word ‘entretenir’, meaning holding together, support, hospitality. What got you into theatre? As someone who came from a very working-class background in Birmingham, with no history of theatregoing – mother
a dinner lady, dad an electrician – I feel a real drive to create access in its broadest sense, and a burning desire to give opportunities because that’s what I had. Kids who don’t get an opportunity to get anywhere near theatre or think it’s for them, can come and perform and play with us. I really liked books and reading, and when I was about 15 the English teacher announced there were going to be auditions for the school play. I was into football but a mate and I went undercover, and I was given a part in this George Bernard Shaw play. And I absolutely loved it. I didn’t know how you became an actor, and the same teacher explained there were things called drama schools. I do remember a conversation with my older sister and mother who were concerned about my future wellbeing, and said “You’re good at English; why don’t you go to university and get a degree which will be something to fall back on?” And I vividly remember rather angrily saying, “If I have something to fall back on, I will fall back on it.” There was no family money and I knew if I came to London and it didn’t work, I’d have to do something else. But that single-mindedness worked for me; I knew I had one shot at it. I’m not suggesting, for any young people reading this programme, that they should follow that particular way!
Sarah Brignall and Hayley Carmichael in On The Verge of Exploding
You obviously had an appetite for risk, which is crucial in any aspect of theatre. That’s really interesting; theatre is at its most deadly when you feel there’s no risk. I’m very wary of second-guessing reactions from audiences. I think we’re constantly surprised. One of our most successful shows was My Perfect Mind performed by me and Edward Petherbridge, directed by Kathryn Hunter, which we took to lots of places. It was devised around Edward’s experience of having had a massive stroke just before he was about to play King Lear. We had people saying to us, “I just saw your show and I really wasn’t sure in the first 10 minutes, and then I really loved it.” I didn’t mind them being candid and that’s the exciting thing: not to bamboozle or confuse an audience but provoke them and not just give them what they’re used to seeing. Without risk, it’s nothing.
The Cat and the Canary seems to sit naturally in that space between comedy and pain. Yes, it fits perfectly within that. It’s a play I wanted to do 12 or 13 years ago but we couldn’t get the rights. I have a memory of watching what I think is the best film version, the 1939 version with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, so it was a nod to my childhood in some ways. I was also drawn to it because it was a genre piece and we’ve never really done much what I’d call ‘genre’. And what appealed to me, and what I’ve tried to do with this terrific cast, is deliver to the audience all the tropes they recognise in this type of ‘whodunnit’ show – eyes moving within a portrait, being plunged into darkness, secret panels opening – but in a surprising, unexpected way, and reigniting a flame under something that’s been around a long time. One of my favourite and most influential film directors was Ernst Lubitsch, who directed a raft of amazing comedies in Hollywood, through the silent era through
Jerone Marsh-Reid, Danielle Bird , Nick Haverson & Sara Alexander in Charlie & Stan Photo Manuel Harlan