Theatre can respond to current affairs and topical events in a way that film and television often find impossible.

Not only is there the immediacy of the stage, where you can hear an actor’s every breath and sense their raw emotion, there is also the more practical aspect of logistics – the fact that a theatre sometimes needs only a short lead time to turn a project around. One reason Chichester Festival has been so successful, says artistic director Jonathan Church, is because it has always tried to time its productions to perfection. It has commissioned works that digest the wider zeitgeist while still honouring its remit, underpinned by Arts Council and local authority money, to offer commercial shows that widen audiences.

Returning to Chichester Festival this year is 2009 blockbuster success Enron, Lucy Prebble’s award-winning tale of greed and loss during financial meltdown, due to hit Broadway after its run in the West End this month. The show premiered at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre last year and captured the public’s imagination after rave reviews.

“What’s great is if you do have a success with a commission like Enron, it can feed into the literary canon, and will continue to be done,” says Church. “Theatre will dry up and die if you don’t have new work, and new work also becomes a self-perpetuating circle for reputation and progress.”

Chichester Festival’s first artistic director was Lawrence Olivier, who introduced the idea that each programme should have at least one new work, so audiences and actors always have the excitement of discovering something for the first time.

“Can you imagine being an audience at Shakespeare’s Globe when each of those plays was premiered?” Church says. “The joy of seeing something you don’t know and being surprised and touched by it is the most important thing.”

Four new world premieres are in this year’s programme. With an election due in a month, Yes, Prime Minister, written by the threesome behind the original TV series and featuring David Haig, whose most recent credits include political spoof The Thick Of It, will debut at the Festival Theatre seven days after all our votes have been cast. The timing is perfect.

When it opens it will have taken only six months to bring together – from first idea to stage performance.

“Theatre is very well placed to feed back in that way,” Church says. “And that’s what makes live theatre exciting.”

Robert Tressell – frustrated at the refusal of his contemporaries to recognise the iniquity of society – wrote a classic novel about the British working classes at the turn of the 20th century. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was full of hypocritical Christians, exploitative capitalists and corrupt councillors, and made Tressell one of Hasting’s most famous residents after his death. Adapted by Howard Brenton, who has co-written with festival favourite David Hare in the past, Church says it is another well-placed world premiere.

“We’ll be doing this just after an election, where everybody up and down the country will have looked into the policies and made a democratic decision about who will lead their lives. It is the perfect moment for a piece that looks at the relationship between a man and his working conditions.”

Chichester Festival was founded by Leslie Evershed-Martin in 1962, a local ophthalmic optician and councillor inspired by Canada’s Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which regenerated the Stratford region with a summer festival in a beautiful urban park.

Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Stratford theatre’s founder, encouraged Evershed-Martin to proceed in Chichester. A similar model – motivated by an ambition to draw an audience from a wide catchment area with a strong summer repertoire – was conceived.

Attracting Lawrence Olivier as artistic director – who a year later formed the National Theatre Company and took the best Chichester work to its home at London Old Vic theatre – was an incredible stroke of luck.

This fantastic start brought extraordinary expectation and attention to the festival and gave it a huge and dependable audience, which provided the backbone to the past 50 years.

Now there is the Minerva Theatre, as well as the Festival Theatre, to give more space for more plays and longer runs. And while the public funding allows for riskier programming, it is still high-profile names that often tempt other high-profile names.

In his five years in charge, Church has made bold ideas palatable by mixing name actors with less well-known writers, and vice-versa. For Bingo, a piece by left-field writer Edward Bond, Patrick Stewart – star of the festival production of Macbeth two years earlier – has been invited back.

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with all its sexual politics and class restrictions, is directed by Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre’s Philip Prowse and features Rupert Everett as professor Henry Higgins.

Church admits last year’s festival lacked its usual optimism, which was another reason to pick Pygmalion and the musical 42nd Street. “There is,” he says of the programme, “a wonderful sense of celebration for these tough financial times”, which is typified by the world premiere of Love Story, the show he is already looking forward to, because Howard Goodall’s score will “encounter our audience in a very unusual way, even though they may already know the story.”

* Season runs from April 15 to October 16. Tickets £12 to £37.

To book tickets for any show call 01243 781312 or visit www.cft.org.uk