First rehearsals
September 10, 2012
Day 1
How fast it came around! We met our stage managers and assistant directors for the first time. So many people are involved in Pericles already and we hadn't even met the entire production team.
Sitting in that room full of people filled me with excitement that we all about to embark on creating something amazing together.
We had a read through of the script taking it in turns to read the various parts. It sounded great and with the edit the plot still flowed well. Already we were beginning to see the light and shade, comedy and tragedy within the play.
After the read-through we were told our parts. Everyone in the cast is going to be busy all the time, whether we have many smaller roles or one big one. The way James and Jamie have cast it really enables the feeling of 'ensemble'.
Ensemble, as a word for me, brings about so many happy memories of theatre-going over the past 3-4 years, seeing the many plays the Long Ensemble performed, for me to be a part of something like that is incredible!
After the rehearsal many of us headed over to what James described as 'our new local' pub, The One Elm Tree - another opportunity for us to get to know each other, and our directors, outside the rehearsal environment.
Day 2
Such a funny evening – you wouldn't believe how silly a group of around 30 adults can be when playing group games. But don't be fooled into thinking we just ran round a rehearsal room for three hours playing silly games.
The group was split up into smaller groups each allocated a place from Pericles; my group had Ephesus.
We had to come up with anything we could to describe Ephesus as a place – using words from the text, or words we felt were relevant, including the characters that are associated with that place.
Then we had to create a silent dumb show style piece on the essence of our place.
Jamie placed some background music as an underscore to the pieces when shown back to the whole group. Some of them were incredibly moving, others very funny but all showing a clear idea of what each 'land' was like.
For the next activity we had to create, in small groups, a tableaux of the scenes we were given, give it a title and have our photo taken in the image we created.
My group had scenes 2, 8 and 14. Our titles were 'Fight of Flight', 'New Hope' and 'Foul Play'.
After rehearsals a few of us went over to The One Elm Tree for a relax, a chat and some fun with gingerbread men.
As I cycled home, it still seemed quite surreal that at 18 I was cast in a professional RSC production. Outstanding!
by Hannah Kelly
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