Bringing rabbits to life from page to stage in Watership Down

We’re now in week three of rehearsals for Watership Down, and have just finished choreographing the "Lettuce Song". If you’ve seen the film, Rona Munro‘s version of the book may take you by surprise. It’s a big, joyful family adventure with music, song and puppetry. And as my tired limbs will testify – lots and lots of movement!

Even before rehearsals began, the questions started: ‘how are you going to play a rabbit?’

There’s a quote from the novel, which our director Adam Penford and movement director Naomi Said keep coming back to in the rehearsal room, and it has inspired our approach to creating the show enormously: "The current that flows among creatures who think of themselves primarily as a group… to fuse them together and impel them into action".

Since day one, we’ve been working hard to channel this idea and build a strong ensemble – a band of brothers who the audience will believe live very closely together and have an underlying connection and physical language. From there we hope the audience will take the leap of imagination and follow our journey, believing the characters are animals and not human – using our bodies to help tell a story of survival.

The starting point has been Rona Munro’s text. You can tell straightaway from the dialogue that these are not human voices, nor are the characters reacting with natural human instincts. The rabbits can jump from fear to joy, back to fear in a split second. Most of the movement has been devised with Naomi through improvising ideas as a group.

We’ve been looking at what emotional state the rabbits are in – are they joyful, playful, alert, determined, or afraid?

From these exercises, we’ve been able to build subtle, small movements right through to big, dynamic pieces. For instance, we’ve just explored how the rabbits deal with conflict and how they fight and spar with each other. The cast are bringing some great ideas and experience to the room. Some of the cast have been in War Horse, some have worked with Frantic Assembly or have physical comedy backgrounds from productions such as One Man, Two Guvnors.

Even for the fittest in the company, the process has been demanding. Every morning we do a ‘bootcamp’ warm up – think squats and sit ups – to make sure we’re ready for when the show opens. We need to be able to dart, twitch and leap – and as with the "Lettuce Song" – dance, which requires a lot of strength and agility.

Puppets are also a big part of creating the world – our puppet designer and director Matt Hutchinson has taken inspiration from abstract objects that might be found in the farmyard or countryside to represent other creatures encountered on the rabbits' journey; an owl is a torch and leather glove, and a crow is represented by a fringed leather or black jacket. As with our portrayal of the rabbits, the puppets are figurative, stylised and non-literal suggestions of the animal. Working the puppets (mine’s a stoat) has been a fascinating process, especially coming from War Horse – where I was one of the few who had no involvement in the puppetry and watched fellow cast members working the show’s full-size horses with sheer admiration.

The flavour of the world of Watership Down keeps building and developing – we’ve just added in music written especially for this production by Dom Coyote, bringing in The Watermill’s signature actor-musician style to the piece too. I can’t wait for audiences to join us and set out with us on this big adventure.

By James Backway
Watership Down runs at The Watermill Theatre until 23 July.