Chichester Festival Theatre has announced its 2026 season which includes eight world premieres as well as a beloved musical and one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies!
Six previous Chichester productions are currently playing in the West End or around the country and there is every sign that this year’s line-up will add to that.
Geraldine James and David Haig are just two of the big stars lined up to appear, full details below.
World premieres:
- Magic – Festival Theatre, April 24 to May 16
- Eclipse – Minerva Theatre, May 8 to June 6.
- Atonement – Festival Theatre, May 29 to June 5.
- 45 Years – Minerva Theatre, June 12 to July 11.
- Atlantis – Minerva Theatre, July 18 to August 15.
- a small and quiet light – Minerva Theatre, August 21 to September 12.
- Antigone Exits – Minerva Theatre, September 26 to October 17.
For family audiences:
- Roald Dahl’s The BFG, Festival Theatre, March 9 to April 11.
- Hey! Christmas Tree – Minerva Theatre, December 5 to 27.
- Peter Pan – Festival Theatre, December 14 to 30
Classic musicals and dramas:
- My Fair Lady – Festival Theatre, July 6 to September 5.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Festival Theatre, September 18 to October 17.
Artistic Director Justin Audibert said: “As we announce our brand new season, six previous Chichester Festival Theatre productions are playing in London or around the country – reaching 472,000 people in 2025. It’s a powerful testimony to the quality and appeal of the shows we make here that many go on to delight audiences far beyond West Sussex.
“Festival 2026 features no fewer than eight world premieres, as well as our eagerly anticipated summer musical and Shakespeare’s most popular comedy. In the Festival Theatre are five shows with spectacle and theatricality at their very heart, including Chichester’s first ever production of My Fair Lady.
“In the intimate Minerva, five new plays explore family and our place in the world on a very human level. All ask searching questions about ourselves and our society, while often making us laugh too.”
The season opens with its big blockbuster, Tom Wells’ adaptation and world premiere production of Roald Dahl’s The BFG which recently concluded a hugely popular run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It will run at the Festival Theatre from March 9 to April 11 before transferring to Singapore.
The first of the entirely new productions will be Magic written by and starring David Haig (Downton Abbey the Movie, Cobra).
Based on extraordinary historical events – 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Houdini’s death – Magic asks what we’re prepared to believe, and why.
Harry Houdini is the greatest illusionist the world has ever known. Arthur Conan Doyle is the creator of literature’s most brilliant detective, Sherlock Holmes. Their mutual admiration blossoms into a profound friendship, even as they discover a shared obsession with spiritualism.
Conan Doyle believes fervently in the psychic world and the promise of reunion with his dead son; Houdini is determined to demonstrate it’s a cruel fraud. Which of these sparring partners will be proved right: the genius writer of fiction or the infallible magician?
W1A writer John Morton presents his debut stage play Eclipse which opens the Minerva Theatre’s summer season on May 8. Starring Sarah Parish (the Wedding Date) and Rupert Penry-Jones (Spooks), it is a painfully funny, acute and delicate play about our struggle to communicate, in the face of life and of death.
In the kitchen of an old Devon rectory, the daughter who stayed and the son who moved away make conversation with their current and former partners, the milkman, the postman, the care workers. They talk about the weather, the roads, the toaster, the bins. About anything except the simmering tensions between them, as their father lies mortally ill in the next room. Until the unspoken emotions and conflicts of years boil over.
Ian McEwan’s masterpiece novel Atonement is being adapted for the stage and will receive its world premiere at Chichester Festival Theatre from May 29 to June 5.
On an English country estate during the blazing summer of 1935, 13 year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a passionate scene between her elder sister Cecilia and the son of their housekeeper, Robbie.
In a disastrous desire for drama but only a dim understanding of its impact, Briony makes an accusation which will fatally alter Cecilia and Robbie’s lives and many others too – for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
Calendar Girls star Geraldine James makes her Chichester debut in 45 Years. Adapted from Andrew Haigh’s critically acclaimed 2015 film it tells the story of how the body of a young woman is found in the melting ice after being entombed for decades.
Meanwhile, a thousand miles and 45 years away… a crack forms in the crystal of a marriage. It’s the week leading up to Kate and Geoff’s wedding anniversary and preparations for the party are in full swing until a letter from Switzerland quietly shatters their world.
The ever popular musical My Fair Lady will be staged in Chichester for the first time. Featuring classic songs like “With a Little Bit of Luck” “I Could have Danced All Night” and “Wouldn’t it be Loverly”, this 20th century masterpiece has been described as the perfect musical with its sparkling dialogue, brilliant lyrics, witty story and gorgeous costumes.
Cockney Eliza Doolittle scrapes a living selling flowers on the streets of London. Her dream of being a lady in a florist’s shop is out of reach unless she can speak ‘proper English’. So when she encounters Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, she seizes the chance to transform her life.
Higgins blithely takes on a bet to turn the woman he dismisses as a “squashed cabbage leaf” into a high society paragon. But his impulsive wager becomes a journey of discovery for both him and Eliza.
Emily White’s play Atlantis tells the story of a small coastal village in Wales where Bryn and Gwen learn they will be forced to abandon their cherished home in the face of rising seawater. Their crisis rekindles Gwen’s crusading spirit, cradled at the Greenham Common protests in the 1980s – a commitment inherited by her granddaughter Rhiannon.
But as the years pass, their passionate activism threatens to divide mother from daughter, sister from brother, husband from wife. This deeply touching and thought-provoking play (winner of the George Devine Award) follows four generations as they discover the cost of saving their home – and the planet.
a small and quiet light is based on the life of Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914-1944), an extraordinarily courageous woman who paid the ultimate price for her heroic fight against fascism.
In a small office on the Avenue Foch in Paris in 1943, a Gestapo interrogator is questioning a young woman who has been known by many different names: Babuli, Jeanne Marie, Nora, Madeleine.
As one of the secret agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive – and the first female radio operator to be sent undercover into France – she has evaded capture far longer than most. But now she has been betrayed.
As she faces the fate she has dreaded so long, memories crowd in – a beloved father, a thwarted lover, a gruelling journey to war, and an endless longing for her childhood piano. What has led her here?
The exuberant, enchanted world of Shakespeare’s magical comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream heralds the final Festival Theatre production of the season.
It is given a modern look, turning from the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s to the Sussex raves of the 1990s for this riotously entertaining new production
Antigone Exits by Nina Segal winds up the Minerva season. Antigone’s brother has died in a bloody civil war. The king – her uncle – has forbidden anyone to bury the body. Antigone is going to bury the body anyway.
Twenty-five centuries after Antigone, seven performers gather to re-tell the tale of what is buried and what comes of it. Ancient Greece crashes into the contemporary, as Sophocles’ classic tragedy shines a scorching light onto our current world.
Full details of the Chichester Festival Theatre 2026 season can be found here: www.cft.org.uk
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