Autumn highlights package planned for cancelled Petworth summer festival

Petworth Festival is sending out the most positive message possible amid the coronavirus gloom.
artistic director Stewart Collinsartistic director Stewart Collins
artistic director Stewart Collins

This year’s Petworth Festival (July 14-August 1) has been cancelled.

But artistic director Stewart Collins and the Petworth Festival Team have confirmed they are planning to put together a week-long festival highlights package for the autumn.f we can all get back out again later this year, then a best-of week, starting on Friday, October 16, will be added to the calendar just before the scheduled tenth-anniversary Petworth Literary Week (Saturday, October 24-Sunday, November 1).

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Together the two elements will make up Petworth’s new autumn festival.

artistic director Stewart Collinsartistic director Stewart Collins
artistic director Stewart Collins

“We had a fantastic line-up for this summer,” Stewart said, “and we investigated the chances of having a highlights week as an additional week to our literary week, and that is now very much the plan.

“The first question we talked about was what can we do and when. We just want to get back to offering everyone the benefits of the festival and also to act for the health of the organisation itself.

“It is devastatingly hard to survive a year without a festival at all when you have still got all the costs of managing the festival and then not having it, but we are going to try to find a way to put on a fantastic week. We have checked the availability of the artists for that period, and we will be able to have a fantastic highlights series.

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People will maybe be slightly nervous about coming back out and I imagine that the world will only just be reopening and that there may well be financial issues that are impacting on people. Instead of the 40 events of the festival we had planned, it is going to be more like ten events over the week. It will be a much less intense week, but we are still managing to tie down some fantastic performers.

“We have had some lovely feedback. We have had a lot of feedback already from our audiences, lovely messages which are really supportive. We know that we have fantastic audience loyalty for the festival, and we are very pleased that we might be able to do something. Can you imagine what the feeling is going to be like when we are all allowed out again after three or four months or however long it will be.”

As for the impact on the festival finances, the point is that the highlights week will ensure that the damage is limited: “There will be damage clearly, but if we can put on some strong events and keep our momentum going, then we can limit it much more.”

The festival has already spent tens of thousands of pounds – salaries, two or three events for potential sponsors, plus the production already of a certain amount of literature etc.

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“But with the highlights week, the best situation is that we raid our reserves by 25 per cent rather than 75 per cent. And the response from the artists has been extraordinary. There has only been one artist that we approached who said they could not do it because they had another booking overseas during that week. But everyone else has said yes. Everyone has lost an enormous amount of work. The fact that we are coming back to offer them work later in the calendar has been highly appreciated.

“I thought for every booking I would be making two or three phone calls, but it has been pretty much a 100 per cent success rate.”

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