Rehearsing The Winter's Tale: Week 1

ENO Harewood Artist Samantha Price discusses her first week creating the role of Perdita in a world premiere from ENO’s composer-in-residence Ryan Wigglesworth, The Winter‘s Tale.

Olivier-Award winning actor Rory Kinnear makes his directorial debut with this compelling new interpretation of Shakespeare’s tale of love, loss and reconciliation.

See The Winter’s Tale at the London Coliseum from 27 February – 14 March 2017

Here, Sam discusses all that went on during the first week of rehearsals for the world premiere of The Winter’s Tale.

‘There’s a huge amount of work that goes into planning for even day one of rehearsals’

‘As this is a brand new opera, fresh from the mind of the wonderful Ryan Wgglesworth, there is nothing to refer to-  There are no recordings, there’s nothing to watch, there are no previous productions to get any insight from!  Which means that when you’re learning the notes and the music to start with, you have to get the information from the page and work with some amazing coaches to try and create the role from scratch!’

‘Monday was the best treat of all – we got to meet everyone, had a quick chat from Rory Kinnear to give us a little bit of insight into what he envisages the production to be like, and then in the afternoon we got to listen to Ryan, with the help of Nicholas Ansdell-Evans play through the entire opera and he was singing all of the parts!’