How a play comes together at Chichester Festival Theatre

SussexWorld

The chances are that most people sitting in the audience at Chichester Festival Theatre will be unaware of the vital role Amelia Ferrand-Rook has played in the production they're watching.

Transcript

00:00 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Now, lovely

00:07 this morning to speak to Amelia Ferron-Rook. Now, Amelia, you are Senior Producer at the

00:12 Festival Theatre, which means you're in the position that your role is absolutely vital,

00:16 but probably 99% of the people sitting in the audience don't know that your role exists

00:21 and you are happy with that. You're not about the limelight, but you are that crucial meeting

00:26 point of every single department, aren't you? I'm definitely not about the limelight, you're

00:31 right. And yes, there are two producers at the Festival Theatre and we sit sort of in

00:39 the middle of a web that makes the shows. From Justin having the creative idea and Cathy,

00:48 the Executive Director, putting the budget together, we then contract people, do the

00:54 negotiations, talk to the designers about the design, talk to the casting directors

01:00 about employing the actors and sort of liaise with every department to bring the production

01:05 together. So once it's decided what the production is going to be, it's over to you to assemble

01:10 the pieces? Is that the right way to think of it? Yes, absolutely. I think we put the

01:14 jigsaw together of everyone that will be there on day one of rehearsals to start putting

01:18 the production together and we hopefully help steer it towards getting it onto stage and

01:24 an audience seeing it. And a key part of the steering is bearing in mind the budget, presumably.

01:29 You've got to make sure it goes to budget. How tough is that then? Because it's really

01:34 tough. It's one of the main pieces of the job because obviously we are a subsidised

01:43 company. We work towards very tight budgets and hopefully the audience feels we make very

01:50 exciting shows. But the last thing you want to do is squash creativity, but you absolutely

01:57 have to walk the budget line. So yes, that is a constant juggle.

02:01 Well, I was going to say, is it juggling or is it a jigsaw? It sounds like a monumental

02:06 headache, but you were talking about your job as being a joy to do.

02:11 It is a joy. I think the joy is seeing it as it progresses. We're so lucky that we get

02:18 the whole process. So from reading the play right in the first instance and imagining

02:24 things in your head, we work through that process and then sit at press night and watch

02:29 the show and see what the culmination of it is.

02:32 What's that feeling as you're sitting there seeing the finished product?

02:38 Oh, I'm terrible. I mean, my colleagues will say I'm terrible at press nights now. I'm

02:42 very twitchy because you have no control over anything and you have to let it play. But

02:51 it's watching audience reactions as well, I think. I think that's the positive bit of

02:55 press night, seeing how people react to something that everyone's been working on for six, seven,

02:59 eight months.

03:00 Goodness, yeah. Obviously.

03:01 And then letting it run and it still develops. I know you know from seeing things early on

03:09 in the run of a show to the end, it still changes and develops as actors take it on,

03:15 as the creative teams leave. And it's a living being, really. So it's exciting to watch.

03:22 And part of the fun and the complexity is that you are dealing with such different plays,

03:27 aren't you?

03:28 Yes, absolutely. I mean, from lightweight comedies to the musicals to Shakespeare to

03:35 heavy new drama. Yeah. And that's again, I think that's what keeps the interest there

03:39 is you're not just focused on one thing for a very long time. We get to jump around between

03:45 11 productions.

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