Presidential assassins gather in Chichester

The piece offers a surreal carnival and a group of people who have one thing in common: they want to assassinate the President of the United States. Some succeed, some fail. But there’s a prize for them all: a place in the history books. There can’t be many stranger premises for a musical. Peter admits: “It is something we are trying to get our heads around. I read a book on Sondheim, his second volume of lyrics with commentary and it seems that he thought this was one of the most perfect pieces he had ever written. I think it was partly because the form and the content just married so well together. It's not a conventional narrative. It is almost more like a revue format. It is telling a lot of stories rather than one story, the stories of all these assassins and would-be assassins, some who were successful and some who were not. And it puts them all together in one place.”

Peter is playing the Proprietor: “In the original version there was a framing device. It all takes place at the shooting gallery in a travelling carnival and I play the proprietor who in the original framing device was the proprietor of the shooting gallery. The whole thing has got a very dark gallows humour about it but it does also make quite a few very serious points. The reason we're doing it now is that we're in this period since the storming of the Capitol and the Trump era and we are in an era where violence is directed against the political establishment. We are in a period where our democracy is in jeopardy with the rise of populist authoritarian rulers and these days the possibility of violence is very real. I'm not saying that we're moving towards this assassination of another American president but there is definitely something in the air.”

The piece doesn't justify the killers and would-be killers: “But it shines a light on them and it shows them getting to the point where they want to kill a president. And the people that are playing the assassins have really researched a lot about their characters. And quite a lot of them have discovered that when their characters were arrested, those that didn't get killed, they didn't say that they were necessarily wanting to kill a president or the president. It was more a question that they felt forgotten or that they felt angry or that they felt betrayed. That's what I took away from it – that it was actually more about them than it was about the presidents that they were wanting to kill.

“I haven't done a lot of Sondheim. I did A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum around the turn of the century and then I didn't do another for quite a long time until I did Follies. And that made me think that I wanted to do more. I think the approach to Sondheim is the approach to the particular play. They are challenging pieces. It is not just a question of going on and doing melody and chorus. They are complex and chewy because he was primarily a lyricist. It is complicated and intelligent writing but once you've got it under your belt, it is a bit like doing Shakespeare.”

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