John Gale obit

John Gale OBE 1929-2025

 He was not on the list.

John Gale OBE, Artistic Director of CFT 1985 – 1989, has died at the age of 95.

Justin Audibert and Kathy Bourne, Artistic and Executive Directors respectively of Chichester Festival Theatre, said:

‘Today we are mourning the loss of John Gale, who came to Chichester as Executive Producer under Patrick Garland in 1983, and took over as Director of the Theatre from 1985 – 1989. He’d previously been a highly successful West End commercial producer, and not only put CFT on a firm financial footing but also programmed many memorable productions, ranging from John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me with Alan Bates to Noël Coward’s Cavalcade with 200 members of the local community, and from Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Scarlet Pimpernel with Donald Sinden to Sam Mendes’s staging of London Assurance with Paul Eddington.

‘But John’s two most lasting legacies were the firm establishment of Chichester Festival Youth Theatre in 1985, and the building of the Minerva Theatre which opened in 1989 with Sam Mendes as its Artistic Director. Today, it’s hard to imagine CFT without those twin pillars of its existence and we will all forever be in his debt.

‘John continued to be a frequent visitor to the Theatre from his nearby Sussex home. His passion for Chichester Festival Theatre never dimmed and we send our deepest sympathies to his wife Lisel, his wider family and many friends.’

John Gale, who has died aged 95, was a leading West End play producer of the 1960s and 1970s and one of the shrewdest exponents of light comedy and farce in the history of the postwar British stage.

His best-known productions were Boeing-Boeing (1962), The Secretary Bird (1968) and No Sex Please, We’re British (1971), which holds the record for the longest-running comedy in British theatrical history.

Gale, who kept his finger on the pulse of the London play-going public, including tourists, more profitably than most of his rivals, used to say: “It is a great mistake to go into a production because it is commercial – more often it isn’t.”

As the pre-eminent impresario of light straight stage entertainment, he hardly qualified for the description of adventurous, but his productions were usually good of their kind, even if that kind rarely found critical support. They were also most carefully cast, often with players of the front rank.

Among numerous other successes were Abelard and Heloise (1970), Lloyd George Knew My Father (1972) and The Mating Game (1972). Several of the 80-odd shows he put on in London, the provinces, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa broke box-office records.

His outstanding success was Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot’s two-act farce about a bank manager and his wife embarrassed by an inundation of pornographic material through their letterbox. Originally sketched out on the corner of a napkin in a Chinese restaurant, the play had been submitted to Gale as The Secret Sex Life of a Sub-Branch Bank Manager. He hated the title, and after trying some 40 alternatives, it opened in 1971 as No Sex Please, We’re British.

The production was beset by technical misfortunes; its author Alistair Foot died inauspiciously on the opening night; and Gale firmly expected the production to survive a mere three weeks. In the event, its middle-class anxieties and sexual innuendo were so perfectly of its time that it became a phenomenal hit. It played for a record-breaking 16 years, closing in 1987 after 6,761 performances.

Long after the play had begun to appear dated, it continued to attract an audience, sentimental about the innocent smut of the piece. It was calculated during its West End run that a £1,000 investment in its production would have yielded any investor after three years a 4,000 per cent return on his money.

As every West End manager will attest, however, only one production in four or five can be counted on to make a profit. It was Gale’s shrewd judgment of a script, insight into public taste and knowledge of how to promote a production which helped to make a few shows profitable enough to finance the other three or four.

As soon as he saw Boeing-Boeing in Paris, for instance, Gale flew to New York to secure the rights. His faith was justified. His 1962 production, adapted by Beverley Cross from Marc Camoletti’s French original, cost £6,000 to mount and – with David Tomlinson, Leslie Phillips and Nicholas Parsons successively in the lead role – it played for five years, earning Gale £133,000. Early successes such as these enabled him to call upon the leading talents of the day, which in turn enabled him to raise the money from backers.