Watership Down Rehearsal Diary – Week Three

9 June 2016

Back to the beginning…

Now that we’ve finished working through the play we go back and start again.  This time we go through it with a slightly finer tooth comb; making changes to blocking we loosely set in week one, fixing on-stage ‘traffic’ issues, allowing time for costume changes, seeing how those costumes will affect movement we’d choreographed, allowing time to pick up/drop off instruments etc… so there’s a huge amount to do.

We’ve been given our costumes by our lovely wardrobe department and this week we’ve started to wear them in rehearsals. Your movement can be restricted by what you’re wearing so we need to get used to how it feels.  Due to the ensemble nature of this play, many of the parts are ‘double cast’ meaning one actor plays multiple characters.  This week we started to run sections of the play in real time so we can get an idea of how long we have to change our costume… Amanda in the wardrobe department has to be very crafty with elastic and velcro to allow an actor to change costume in less than 20 seconds!

We’ve spent lots of time working the music into the movement sections we finished last week.  There will be live violin, accordion, percussion and singing on stage to accompany these moments and Dom has been engineering when and how this happens.  Some of the music that Dom’s written sounds quite folk like, which works perfectly in complimenting the storytelling nature of the play.  It’s written in a very natural place for our voices, which stops it from sounding like ‘singing’ and more like a band of brothers on a journey…  I like to think that these moments represent Richard Adams’ allusions to the camaraderie of a group of World War II soldiers.  Dom has also written all the underscoring (background music) and sound effects that accompany the play’s scene changes, moments of action or tension, fight scenes and Naomi’s movement sequences.  Adding sound to these sections will allow the drama to have the filmic quality that this script lends itself to.

Nothing else to report really… Oh except we all had a lovely time at The Watermill Summer Fair on Sunday!

Scarlet Wilderink

Scarlet is playing Hyzenthlay in Watership Down at The Watermill from Thursday 16 June to Saturday 23 July.
Find out more and buy tickets.