Director Anna Ledwich comes full circle as she returns to Chichester Festival Theatre to direct Coram Boy on the main-house stage.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Nansal Six Newspapers. Lovely
00:06 to speak again to Ellen Ledwich. Now you're back at Justice for the Theatre. We've had
00:11 the savagery of the Tudors, we've got the chat savagery now of a slightly different
00:15 era. You are directing The Coram Boy on the main house stage, the second main house production
00:20 in the summer season. What's it all about then? What have we got in store with this?
00:25 It sounds huge.
00:27 It is huge. It's a wonderful, I guess, epic tale, which covers a number of years in the
00:35 mid 18th century. And it incorporates choir boys at Gloucester Cathedral, the wealthy
00:43 gentry of the Gloucester countryside, villainy of the London underclass, intersecting all
00:52 in wondrous coincidences and, I guess, moments of lives passing by each other. And the play
01:00 itself, I mean, to try and talk about the plot is, I fail at it every time, which probably
01:05 isn't a reassuring sign from the director. But what the play contains is wonderful ideas
01:14 of as human beings and as a culture, many contrasting things coexist and the tension
01:22 between those two things, whether it be extreme wealth being built in the extreme poverty,
01:28 the sense of heavenly music sitting alongside desperate acts of villainy. And so what's
01:35 really delicious, I think, about the play is that it sucks you into this world and you're
01:40 taken on this journey following a number of different characters and which there is real
01:49 emotional highs and lows. It's a sense of a real roller coaster of a ride with moments
01:56 of fantasy and moments of gritty reality, all dovetailing with the work of Handel, which
02:04 is written into the play. The creation of the Messiah is essentially happening alongside
02:09 the action of the play. So we have live singing, live music. And so it's a really wonderful
02:15 piece to have in the festival theatre, I think.
02:18 Absolutely. And a really wonderful piece for you personally, given that it was in Chichester
02:22 that you trained as a director. How do you look back on that training?
02:26 Oh, I had a wonderful time at Chichester. I was in Chichester for two years under Jonathan
02:32 Church. And in that time, I got to assist on productions both in the festival space
02:37 and the Minerva. I feel I know those theatres really, really well. And there's something
02:42 very special about, I think, the relationship between the audience and the stage. And certainly
02:49 plays I think that, especially in the festival space, invite the audience into their world.
02:55 This is one of those plays, I think, that will really just flourish within that particular
03:01 setting.
03:02 That sounds great. But when you look back, can you think in terms of ways that Chichester
03:06 shaped you as a director, things that you gained here that perhaps you wouldn't had
03:10 you trained somewhere else?
03:11 That's a really tricky question. No, I mean, who knows? I mean, I think what I personally,
03:19 through the various different productions that I assisted on, it was an understanding
03:23 of working on a certain scale, with a certain profile of performer as well, with a certain
03:30 level of director, and watching certain directors that, you know, have a way of working that
03:39 at times can be uncompromising, or at times can be deeply compromising. It's a really
03:44 interesting experience to sit in someone else's room and observe how they navigate the creative
03:48 process, and then how always that creative process is having to butt up against the reality
03:52 of putting a space within a certain amount of time. So I was very lucky to work with
03:57 very, very high quality people. I mean, I think that's the real hallmark of Chichester.
04:01 It's gold standard for sure.
04:03 And now you've come full circle.
04:05 Yeah, it's a real gift to be back. I'm really looking forward to it.
04:11 Well, congratulations. Lovely to speak to you again after 12 years.
04:14 Yeah, thank you.
04:15 Everything goes brilliant. Thanks for your time.
04:17 Thank you.
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