Festival of Chichester - Why you should always have your dreams ready to share

An evening with Professor Pamela Howard will be in the New Park Centre, Chichester on Friday, June 24 at 6pm.

The Art of Making Theatre (Bloomsbury Books) is subtitled An Arsenal of Dreams in 12 Scenes, and for Pamela those dreams have been crucial throughout her life.

“An arsenal is a store and I have always said you have got to have a store of dreams because one day somebody might ask you ‘Would you like to direct an opera in Rome?’ and if you turn around and say ‘Yes, that would be nice… let me have a think about it for a few weeks,’ then the opportunity will be lost to you.

“You have always got to have those dreams. They don't have to be fully worked-out ideas; they just have to be dreams that you have got and that you can draw on and that you can use, and this is the theme of the book and also of the talk.

“I am nearly 83 and I have always had dreams. I've realised some of them in my lifetime but I have got a lot more yet!”

In the book Pamela shows how her life has always been part of the art of making theatre. Part memoir, part a personal account of artistic creation, it is a work of art in its own right.

Its 12 chapters, accompanied by original drawings, offer insights into Pamela’s creative world and the journey through the life of a celebrated artist, ranging from her early life and influences, to her time at art college and the inspiration she gained from travelling the world.

“My book is a series of pen and ink drawings and each chapter starts with the drawing. It starts when I was very small. It was wartime and I was a little girl and I was living with my refugee family up in the north of England. My mother had a younger brother who was too young to go into the army but he dreamt of being an architect. I used to hold his T-square and he used to draw what architects called perspectives with pen and ink and they had little people running across in front of the buildings. And I used to say all the time ‘But where are these people coming from? And what are they doing? And where are they going?' That was always what I wanted to know and I grew up imagining stories about these people and what they were actually doing, where did they come from when they got to the station, what they did when they got there, where did they go afterwards... and then I discovered literature!”

And then plays: “When I am thinking about plays I'm always thinking where have the people come on from, what are they going to do while they're on the stage and then where are they going to go to when they leave the stage. That's what theatre is about.”

Tickets £12, £10, £6. Tickets from the Festival of Chichester website.