This is why the impact of Covid on the theatre could be huge - according to former Chichester Festival Theatre director Jonathan Church

But his fear is that the damage could be huge.

In the meantime, the focus has to be on family audiences, the demographic which has returned to theatre-going most strongly following all the lockdowns and theatre closures.

And it’s in that context that Jonathan – through his Jonathan Church Theatre Productions – brings the Nottingham Playhouse production of Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful (adapted for the stage by Simon Reade) to Chichester Festival Theatre from March 1-5.

Click here for interview with Private Peaceful starJonathan was hugely successful as Chichester Festival Theatre’s artistic director from 2006-2016, bringing the theatre back from the brink of closure and overseeing a multi-million pound refurbishment to mark its 50th anniversary ten years ago.

He still lives in the Chichester area and is delighted to be returning to the CFT stage with the Morpurgo, precisely the kind of show he believes fits in right now.

“I honestly don’t know how damaged theatre (generally) is going to be. I am in two minds. I have talked to quite a few people around the country and the feeling is that if it is family work and fun work, then it seems to be doing quite well. On the other hand drama is very, very hard at the moment to sell and perhaps that’s because it tends to attract the traditional older theatre audiences. Some of those older audiences are indomitable and have just kept coming but I would say that there is an equal proportion of those older audiences who are being cautious – understandably.

Have you seen Cyrano at the cinema yet?“But I suppose my biggest fear is that it is about habit. There might be people who used to come along to the theatre maybe five or six times as a matter of course but might now only be coming back twice. And in the West End that doesn’t matter but in the regions it is that change in habit that could be really punishing.

“My gut feeling is that those people that used to go to the theatre regularly will perhaps keep on coming but my fear is that they are going to be a lot more choosy. You look at something like Cabaret in London, a major event with two major stars, and it is absolutely one of the hottest tickets around and people are going to see it. There is a risk-reward situation going on there, but my fear is that if people think that something is just going to be average then they won’t go and the impact could be huge for the theatres in the regions.

“I think the failures will still be failures and the hits will still be hits but the body of work in the middle that usually scrapes by could be impacted disastrously.”

So what can theatres do?

“I think the only thing that you can do – and I think the thing that Chichester has done brilliantly – is just to keep on making good work, making really good quality work and just hoping that the theatre audiences somehow start to build up again.

“I do think though that the nature of the work will change.

“Family audiences have not been daunted.

“You look at The Lion King and it is still on 97 per cent. Parents are thinking that the children are braving Covid at school every day and maybe parents are just thinking ‘I’m not going to let my children’s young lives be damaged by what is going on.’ It is the same principle as going to school.”

Jonathan cites the example of a drag panto that happened in the West End and got a big audience “though obviously that’s a different demographic we’re talking about.”

“But I do think this could trigger a shift in the sort of work that is being made.

“Is this really the time when people are going to be going along to see Chekhovs and Ibsens and Shakespeares unless there is a major star in them? And to an extent you had the same thing in the 1960s with the Angry Young Men who pushed out Shaw and Rattigan. So perhaps the repertoire will maybe change for a while and some of what you would call more traditional repertoire will be ignored or neglected.”

Which isn’t to say that it won’t come back at some point. As Jonathan says Rattigan is “constantly being rediscovered rather miraculously”, as indeed Jonathan himself did during his time as Chichester Festival Theatre’s artistic director.

“And look, perhaps a change is probably a good thing in some ways especially if it does mean more new work coming through. The fact is that people are wanting to go out. It is for our industry to work out what it is that they are wanting to see and that’s why I suspect the nature of what we do might be changing.

“And I do think that Private Peaceful falls into that family audience category.”

Arriving with an age guidance of nine and up, it tells the story of the Peaceful brothers, Tommo and Charlie – brothers who have had a tough rural childhood facing the loss of their father, financial hardship and a cruel landlord. Their fierce loyalty to each other pulls them through until one day they both fall for the same girl. And then the Great War comes. Set against the epic backdrop of World War One, we join 18-year-old Private Tommo Peaceful in the trenches as he takes us on a journey through his most cherished memories and tells his story of courage, devotion, family and friendship.

Private Peaceful was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and won the Red House Children’s Book Award and the Blue Peter Book Award. Acknowledged by Michael Morpurgo (War Horse, The Butterfly Lion) as his favourite work, it comes to Chichester in a new ensemble retelling by Simon Reade, directed by Elle While, exploring the lengths a young soldier will go to, to fight for what is right.

“We have found that bookings are tougher in terms of school classes being a bit nervous about mobilising that number of people. But family audiences are still coming.”

And it certainly fits in with work which Jonathan previously did at Chichester including Goodnight Mr Tom and Running Wild: “We were wanting to develop that strand of work and

Kathy Bourne (now executive director of Chichester Festival Theatre) used to say to me in Chichester that the other one we should do was Private Peaceful. We just never got around to it and then I moved on but Kathy was my introduction to the book and you can see why it has become such a modern classic.”

The piece was being done in Nottingham: “I approached them and said is there a way that we could get involved and take it to other venues as well.”

The hope is for third time lucky. It was cancelled twice because of the pandemic.

“But it is a brilliant story and when I read it, it really made me think about the piece we did in the Minerva some years ago about the soldier that was shot. It is an incredibly powerful story and like a lot of those rites of passage type stories it reminds me of things like To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice And Men. You’ve got this really powerful relationship between young people that are growing up. It’s for me in a world of literature of coming of age stories – though obviously there is a dark heart.

“But there is something positive about it too, this relationship between the three central characters and between the two men.

“There is something fundamental about young people being terrified of not having a connection, of not having love, of not finding their way in the world. And I think this speaks to that, a piece about true friendship and love. It is a very emotional piece.”

Michael Morpurgo’s own childhood came against a background of war, as he explains: “I was born a really long time ago. October 5 1943. In St Alban’s in Hertfordshire. My mother was there too, strangely enough, but my father was away at the war, in Baghdad. I had one older brother, Pieter. We both were evacuated to Northumberland when we were little, away from the bombs. After the war it was all change at home, not that I remember much of it. My mother wanted to be with a man she had met while my father was away in the army. He was called Jack Morpurgo. So my father came home to find there was no place for him. There was a divorce. Jack Morpurgo married my mother, and so became our stepfather. We lived in London then. We went to primary school at St Matthias in the Warwick Road, then were sent off to boarding school in Sussex – the Abbey, Ashurst Wood.”

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