Philip Pullman speaks of hoping to instil a sense of awe and wonder in his readers. For Director Nicholas Hytner the challenge is to achieve that live on stage. The technical rehearsal is the first opportunity for the cast and the technical and creative teams to find out how, and whether, everything that they have planned from the first model and storyboard stage actually works.
For the audience everything must seem to work effortlessly. But getting it right can take days of painstaking and sometimes nerve-wracking technical rehearsal. Anything that doesn’t work must be ruthlessly cut. Props, lines, stage moves, entrances and exits, and sometimes whole scenes may be rearranged or disappear entirely.
Time is tight, and the pressure is on. Working
long hours Production Manager Sacha Milroy has the daunting task of making sure all the technical aspects work smoothly, and responding to every change or unforeseen hitch.
At last Lighting Director Paule Constable and her crew can move from the drawing board to practise getting it all right
on the night; and Sound Designer Paul Groothuis can focus on the best way to create an
ambience. Watch them in the Technical rehearsal experimenting with sound and lighting to evoke the
Northern Lights a scene which in performance achieves its full effect with the additional use of video, and the climactic scene where Lyra discovers the awful secret of the Bolvangar
Daemon Cage – a cage full of daemons separated from their humans.
Such is the technical ambition of these two productions that the technical rehearsals overran by days. Planned dress rehearsals and the first public previews were cancelled.