Rehearsing The Winter's Tale: Week 3

ENO Harewood Artist Samantha Price discusses her third week of 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 week 3 of rehearsals for the world premiere of The Winter’s Tale, where the cast and chorus rehearsed together for the first time.

‘We’ve now finished blocking the entire opera – the term blocking refers to a blueprint of each of the scenes and acts, just in terms of the geography – who stands where, and when. We now know the geography of the production’

‘Next week and for proceeding weeks to come weeks there will be much more fine tuning – going back over things and getting more details – maybe changing things, trying different options. Things can always change – sometimes right up to the very last minute.’

‘We had the chorus in this week for one of our sessions working through some of the movement scenes that Anthony and I have already started working on. And as we probably would have guessed, the session that we had individually with Imogen (movement director) was really useful when it came to working with the chorus but we did also completely change everything! We’re now directing things far more specifically to what the chorus is singing and trying to play on the words that they’re singing. We’re seeing how we can draw into the story we’ve got.’

‘Next week we’ve got the sitzprobe coming up which is exciting – I can’t wait to hear the orchestra play when we’ve spent so long trying to imagine what it’ll sound like!’

‘One of the highlights this week was watching Rory work with the chorus – my admiration for this guy just grows! The chorus really love working with him – he’s gone to the effort of learning all of their names before they’d even arrived. He’d written them all a little back story for each group so they’ve got some context.’