Special foyer exhibition marks Rolling Stones play at Chichester Festival Theatre

Helena Berry, heritage and archive manager at the CFT, has masterminded the exhibition – and is also offering exhibition tours on certain dates at £12 (£5 Prologue) with prebooking online: https://www.cft.org.uk/offstage/guided-exhibition-tour-court-of-public-opinion

As Helena explains: “We have been planning to do at least one exhibition per season around the Chichester Festival Theatre summer programme, and we started last year with The Vortex. That was our very first one. There's been a real push to use the foyer more and to make it more interactive. We have been having a lot more visitors during the day since Covid and also families enjoying the family fun activities and we just wanted to use the foyer more. I like to think of the exhibition as an extended pre-show talk but something done in a very visual way.”

Inevitably one of the challenges is that the theatre foyer is quite obviously a theatre foyer and not a gallery: “It is a bit of a nightmare space. People think it's huge but when you've got 1,300 people in the foyer, the space is actually quite limited. And also it's a public space. You can't have anything of major value plus it's not a gallery space so you've got to work around the obstacles that there are. But the point is that we don't want just a gallery exhibition. We want to make it more interactive and I think each of the exhibitions we have done has got a bit more ambitious than the last. The first one we did was wonderful objects from the Noel Coward archive on display so that was more of a traditional exhibition and then around The Other Boleyn Girl we had a wonderful display of Tudor costumes so that was a bit more active and a bit more visual, and now with this one we're trying to get audience participation and wanting audience feedback. The whole thing encourages a lot more community response and we will have a touch screen experience where you can explore the timeline of the story in the play.”

Helena appealed for items to the exhibition: “And we had an amazing response. What I'd expected was a lot of first-hand accounts along the lines of ‘My mum's dad was a police officer during the bust’ but we actually didn't get so much of that and instead we got a wonderful energy and enthusiasm for the story and its folklore with local artists and local poets creating things for us. One of the big areas of exhibition is a massive vinyl wall. We asked people to create album covers based on their own personal response to the Redlands story and we got more than 100 album covers. We hope to show them all. Some people have contributed two so we might only use one but the album covers have been such a joy with people being so inventive.

"We have had two wonderful students from West Dean College who've done the most amazing vinyl artwork with a wonderful portrait of Marianne Faithfull; and we have had some pieces that have taken a more collagey approach.

"It is really, really difficult to describe because they are all so different but all so wonderful and all so personal to the individual.”