The Stage

Rigg and Lindsay in Chichester Festival Theatre’s summer season line-up

Published Thursday 21 February 2008 at 16:00 by Alistair Smith

Diana Rigg and Robert Lindsay will both feature in Chichester Festival Theatre’s summer season this year.

Rigg will star as Madame Ranevskaya in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the Festival Theatre, directed by Philip Franks, while Lindsay will play the title role in a new play about the tycoon Aristotle Onassis. The work, which will be performed in the Minerva and directed by Nancy Meckler, is written by Mark Sherman and is called Aristo.

The Minerva - the smaller of Chichester’s two theatres - will also host Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, directed by Rupert Goold, a new play by Ronald Harwood called Collaboration, which will be performed alongside his 1995 companion piece Taking Sides, and a revival of Funny Girl directed by Angus Jackson, which will launch the festival in April.

Meanwhile, in the Festival Theatre, the season will open with The Cherry Orchard, followed by a revival of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, featuring Brian Conley and Scarlett Strallen. CFT artistic director Jonathan Church will direct Susan Hampshire in The Circle by Somerset Maugham and the programme will close with Tim Firth’s new stage adaptation of the film Calendar Girls.

CFT’s youth theatre will take a promenade production of Toad of Toad Hall to Rolls-Royce’s manufacturing plant at Goodwood.