I was invited to be part of an opera libretto reading last Friday, which was quite a unique experience. ‘The Drowing of Rasputin’ is an opera in development with the Centre for Contemporary Opera and as part of their development process, they stage readings of the librettos and invite a panel to speak afterwards on their response to it.

I was playing the Chorus, which presented rather unique challenges. In many Greek pieces the chorus is now often played by one actor, and can be modified to make that believable. However, as this was intended to be a reading of the piece as is, to see how it stands up on its own, we could not make any changes to the script and so I had to try and make a section of lines intended to be sung as solos into a coherent, one-character speech. Other than adopting a twitch and becoming a schizophrenic, I wasn’t sure how to go about it but with the help of Chris Pressley (the director) I managed to pull off something that seemed fairly well received. It was fun to read a libretto as a play script and I think was a useful exercise for me to work with different kinds of text. I look forward to seeing what happens next with this piece!