Chichester's artistic triumvirate ends its tenure on a high note: Edward Kemp's 5/11 is a rich, exciting piece of narrative theatre, beautifully directed by Steven Pimlott, about the Gunpowder Plot. Like all the best historical drama, it offers manifest parallels with the present.
Kemp's argument is that the plan to blow up king and parliament had economic as well as religious origins. Promised toleration by James I, England's Catholics were subject to punitive recusancy fines to pay for royal extravagance. But Kemp also shows that Catesby and his conspirators were passionate believers whose loyalty was to a supra-national Catholic Church. In one of the play's best scenes, we see Catesby trying to extract intellectual justification for acts of terror from the cautious Jesuit leader, Henry Garnet.
Kemp's play looks both backwards and forwards. There are allusions to Julius Caesar and Macbeth as well as nods to Brecht ("Food first, morals later" says Garnet) and to our present troubles: at one point Sir Robert Cecil compares his tulip-beds to "a row of imams in their turbans". But, while Kemp topically suggests that the Gunpowder Plot was a disproportionate response to persecution that would have killed the innocent along with the guilty, he also argues that a state that reneges on promised multiculturalism invites disaster.
With a vast cast of 25, Pimlott creates a brilliant spectacle juxtaposing colourful royal pageants and dark nocturnal conspiracies. Strong performances too from Stephen Noonan as the tunnel-visioned Catesby, Richard O'Callaghan as the conscience-troubled Garnet, Hugh Ross as the Machiavellian Cecil and Alistair McGowan as the bisexual king.
After this Phyllis Nagy's Minerva adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, dealing with the Puritan as opposed to the Catholic 17th-century conscience, seems small beer. Elizabeth McGovern as the abused adulteress and Jo Stone-Fewings as her clerical lover are fine, but this is shredded fiction in which Hawthorne's descriptive prose and calculated ambiguities go for a burton. Who needs adaptations when they can have real plays?
· Until September 8. Box office: 01243 781312.
