Our History

The first Brighton Festival ran from 14 to 30 April 1967, with Ian Hunter as its Artistic Director. The programme included performances by Pink Floyd, The Who and Yehudi Menuhin. Laurence Olivier brought a series of three plays from the National Theatre, with a company that included Geraldine McEwen and Anthony Hopkins.

Pianist Arthur Rubinstein gave his only UK festival performance of the year in the Concert Hall, while Nippon-Nogaku-Dan introduced Brighton audiences to classical Japanese Noh theatre, then still rarely seen outside Japan.

Opera appeared in the Brighton Festival for the first time, with Dame Joan Sutherland performing Handel’s Rodelinda in the Concert Hall. The programme also featured jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald with Count Basie and his Orchestra, alongside theatre, including Eric Porter in the British premiere of Jean Vauthier’s The Protagonist.

Classical ballet was included in the Festival programme for the first time, with performances by the Royal Swedish Ballet. Theatre was represented by the Young Vic, which presented a series of plays including Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, directed by founder Frank Dunlop, while Shirley Bassey appeared in the Dome Concert Hall.

Celebrating Brighton’s association with the sea and its influence on the city’s cultural heritage, the programme brought together an eclectic range of artists, including Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, playwright Harold Pinter, and entertainer Bruce Forsyth.

Nationwide discussions surrounding the 1975 EEC referendum were reflected in the Festival’s theme of ‘Grand Tours’ of Europe, recalling the eighteenth-century fashion for men seeking culture and enlightenment. 

The festival reflects on its local origins and international reputation through exhibitions on early Brighton filmmakers, Magnus Volk, and an expanded local ‘Umbrella’ programme.

The National Theatre returns with For Services Rendered, directed by Michael Rudman. Music highlights include Vladimir Ashkenazy with the Philharmonia Orchestra, plus performances from Sky and Georgie Fame.

Yehudi Menuhin returned to the Festival, while New Sussex Opera made its debut. Brighton Museum presented its landmark Fairies exhibition, offering the UK’s first serious exploration of the role of fairies in the cultural imagination.

Scottish Ballet made an exclusive Festival appearance after subsidy cuts halted its UK tour. Bernard Haitink conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, while the Festival opened with a programme of Russian music performed by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.

Picasso and the Theatre, a major exhibition at Brighton College curated by Gavin Henderson, inspired the Festival’s theme. Ballet Rambert premiered Robert North’s Pribaoutki, drawing on Picasso’s work, at the Theatre Royal Brighton.

The final Brighton Festival under Artistic Director Ian Hunter took place against a backdrop of funding cuts, which reduced the size and scope of the programme. Highlights nevertheless included the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with Yehudi Menuhin.

Sir Richard Attenborough was President of Brighton Festival Society, Warsaw Chamber Orchestra, Warsaw Sinfonietta, Trestle Theatre Co, The Cult. Ballet Rambert premiered ‘Wildlife’ on 17 May, at the Theatre Royal, Brighton

In partnership with Zap Productions, street theatre was introduced to the Festival for the first time, while the brochure was redesigned to reflect the city’s growing number of ‘umbrella’ events. Max Wall’s iconic performance in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape was a theatrical highlight.

The Brighton Town Plays took over the city with twenty mobile stages and a cast of more than 500 performers. Other highlights included Théâtre de Complicité and a season of Nordic-inspired theatre and dance.

Voyage and Vision underpinned the Festival’s programme. Brighton-based playwrights including Terence Rattigan, Howard Barker and Brendan Behan were featured, alongside an exclusive appearance by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Other highlights included Ballet du Nord and exhibitions documenting Aboriginal art and culture. 

Marking the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the Festival embraced the spirit of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. Willard White and Maria Ewing performed with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, while late-night comedy featured Jeremy Hardy and Jo Brand.

Major sponsorship from Gordon’s Gin secures the future of stand-up comedy at the festival. Lily Savage, Jack Dee, and Rory Bremner perform across the city, while Ken Dodd is a concert hall highlight.

STOMP took over the Brighton Dome, while the Laughing Gas Comedy Festival filled the Old Ship Hotel with performers including Alan Davies, Eddie Izzard, Sean Hughes, and Bodger and Badger for younger audiences. Dance highlights included Ballet du Nord and Michael Clark & Company.

Highlights included the UK debut of the Moscow Chamber Opera, performances by Jimmy Somerville and Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet, and an exclusive UK appearance by Etta James.

Michael Clark & Company returned with O, while Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure and the Odeon Theatre of Bucharest’s Richard III delight theatre audiences.

Four UK theatre premieres from Israel, Denmark, New Zealand, and the USA were joined by a dazzling dance programme led by Rambert Dance Company, Nederlands Dans Theater 2, Siobhan Davies Dance, and DV8.

Highlights include a rare UK appearance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, actress Fiona Shaw performing T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and performances from Candoco, The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Award-winning cartoonist Steve Bell designs the brochure cover.

Returning artists included the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg, and Siobhan Davies Dance, while the Festival produced the first UK tour by Japanese dance company Kim Itoh and the Glorious Future.

Theatrical highlights included dreamthinkspeak’s Don’t Look Back alongside exclusive workshops led by Ken Campbell and Patsy Rodenburg. The music programme featured Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Jane Birkin, while the Philharmonia Orchestra accompanied a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 historical drama Alexander Nevsky.

Nick Cave and Laurie Anderson headed up an eclectic all-star line-up in a unique concert honouring legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen. Asian Dub Foundation performed their soundtrack to The Battle of Algiers in a Festival world premiere.

The world premiere of Frantic Assembly’s Dirty Wonderland astonished Festival audiences. Jah Wobble, John Foxx and Robin Guthrie joined composer and pianist Harold Budd for his final live performance before retiring from the concert stage.

Groupe F at Preston Park with audience of 50k, Wildworks’ Souterrain, Spymonkey’s Cooped, The Stomp Company’s Lost and Found Orchestra

Hydrocracker’s The New World Order in the Town Hall, The Maids with Neil Bartlett, Henry V with live orchestra, 41 Places, Run Lola Run with The Bays

Fevered Sleep’s An Infinite Line, Rider Spoke and iconic figures: Miriam Makeba, Jarvis Cocker, Gore Vidal

Guest Director: Anish Kapoor
 

C Curve on the South Downs; Hofesh Shechter's The Art of Not Looking Back ; Hydrocracker's The Erpingham Camp

Guest Director: Brian Eno

Brian Eno’s influence was felt throughout the Festival, with exclusive performances of his works: For All Mankind by Icebreaker and BJ Cole, and Music in 12 Parts performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, who also reprised Glass’ groundbreaking film score ‘Koyaanisqatsi’. dreamthinkspeak took over an abandoned supermarket building for Before I Sleep, while Hofesh Schechter’s Political Mother, a Brighton Festival commission, received its world premiere.

Guest Director: Vanessa Redgrave 

Highlights included Live Transmission, a unique sonic, multi-sensory event inspired by the pioneering UK band Joy Division, as well as performances from Dreamthinkspeak, DV8, and the Trisha Brown Dance Company.

Guest Director: Michael Rosen

Rosen chose the children’s novel Emil and the Detectives as his thematic strand through the Festival, as it expressed “hope, invention, dissent, and co-operation, set mostly in a great city.” The festival featured performances by Clod Ensemble, the Tiger Lillies, Angelique Kidjo, and the UK premiere of My Life After by theatre maker Lola Arias.

Guest Director: Hofesh Schechter

Schechter’s genre-defying programme included the UK premiere of Opus No.7, conceived and directed by Russian director Dmitry Krymov, and William Forsythe’s dance-driven installation Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No.2, which invited participants to move amongst a series of kinetic pendulums

Guest Director: Ali Smith

The themes of Taking Flight and Taking Liberty ran throughout the Festival, which paid tribute to filmmaker Agnès Varda and featured the European premiere of The Apple Family Plays, written and directed by Richard Nelson for The Public Theater, New York.

Guest Director: Laurie Anderson

To mark our fiftieth year there were exclusive performances from Laurie Anderson, while thousands of visitors to the Royal Pavilion Gardens enjoyed a spectacular light installation inspired by letters sent home to India by soldiers convalescing at the Royal Pavilion Military Hospital during World War One. 

Guest Director: Kae Tempest

Kae Tempest’s programme celebrated the ‘Everyday Epic’, inviting audiences to walk in someone else’s shoes from the UK premiere of The Gabriels, Richard Nelson’s extraordinarily intimate portrait of one American family to Your Place, a new initiative that brought a diverse line-up of free performances, workshops and activities by Festival artists and local residents to the Hangleton and East Brighton communities.

Guest Director: David Shrigley

David Shrigley’s Brighton Festival embraced an absurd sensibility, with participation placed firmly at its heart. Highlights included performances by Afro-Futurist collective Brownton Abbey, Kneehigh Theatre’s Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, and NoFit State Circus, alongside more opportunities than ever for audiences to actively take part in the F

Guest Director: Rokia Traore

Award-winning Malian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rokia Traoré is widely regarded as one of Africa’s most inventive musicians. The programme featured the UK premiere of her theatrical and musical project Dream Mandé Djata, a musical monologue rooted in the griot tradition of oral history and the Mandingo epic.

Guest Director: Lemn Sissay

Cancelled for the first time in its history due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we brought Brighton Festival into people’s homes in May 2020, delivering free online performances, family activities and artist masterclasses, and creating mini ‘Children’s Parades’ in gardens, kitchens and living rooms.

Guest Director: Lemn Sissay

Shaped around the theme of ‘care’, Brighton Festival 2021 launches a programme responding to a year of disruption with joy, reflection and hope. It features 10 world and UK premieres and commissions, including new work by Jane Horrocks.

Guest Directors: Marwa Al Sabouni and Tristan Sharps

For the first time, Brighton Festival welcomed two Guest Co-Directors: Syrian architect and author Marwa Al-Sabouni and Tristan Sharps, Artistic Director of dreamthinkspeak. Together they shaped the Festival around the theme of Rebuilding and collaborated with Syrian architect Ghassan Jansiz to create The Riwaq, a pop-up community space on Hove seafront.

Guest Director: Nabihah Iqbal

Musician Nabihah Iqbal invited festival audiences to Gather ’Round in a celebration of community and collaboration. In the Concert Hall, audiences were immersed in the Sumatran rainforest through Invisible Flock’s The Sleeping Tree. The programme also featured Blue Now, a live reworking of Derek Jarman’s final film, and the world premiere of John Lyly’s Galatea, reimagined in an outdoor production by Emma Frankland.

Guest Director: Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Frank Cottrell-Boyce invited everyone to imagine a world of wonder. Highlights included the dazzling spectacle of Carnesky’s Showwomxn Sideshow Spectacular and Zoo Co Theatre’s joyful Perfect Show For Rachel. Participatory events included Re-enactment — an exclusive one-day event for residents of East Brighton featuring a 17th-century banquet — and Brighton Table Tennis Club’s AllStars Extravaganza.

Guest Director: Anoushka Shankar

Inspired by the theme of New Dawn, Anoushka Shankar shaped the programme and performed several times across the Festival, including a stunning performance of Passages with Britten Sinfonia, and a surprise appearance alongside Seckou Keita & The Homeland Band.