Community play actor LIVY POTTER tells how imagination and hard work are bringing a monstrous wolf to life on stage

We’re now deep into rehearsals for York Theatre Royal’s epic community show The Coppergate Woman. In it, I play the voice of Fenrir, the monstrous wolf of Norse mythology, who was said to be so big he could circle the world in one single leap.

So, how exactly do you bring a character like that to life on stage? With a lot of hard work and imagination.

In our production, Fenrir will be made up of a number of actors moving together as one. Juliet Forster and John R. Wilkinson, our directors, plus our Movement Director Xolani Crabtree, have been working with us to explore how we might achieve this; long, thick cords of elastic have been used in this process. Intriguing, right?

This is my first community production with York Theatre Royal. Last year, I was involved with Harrogate Theatre’s immersive community show called Our Gate, which was a great challenge. Immersive theatre can be quite terrifying for an actor because there’s a lot of improvisation involved and you really have to throw yourself into a part, but I learnt a lot from this production.

I’ve never acted on York Theatre Royal’s main stage before, but I have in the much smaller but equally wonderful Studio Theatre. In this space, I played Nina in York Settlement Community Player’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in March 2020, which we put on a week before the theatre closed for the first time due to covid. I felt very grateful to have this show as a distraction as news from around the world got scarier and scarier. Theatre can be such a tonic in trying times.

Before that (and my move to York), I did a lot of acting at Ilkley Playhouse and was lucky enough to tour a production of Jessica Swale’s Blue Stockings to the Minack Theatre in Cornwall in the summer of 2019.

The Minack is a theatre unlike any other, a spectacular open air amphitheatre space that is perched on the Cornish cliffs just east of Land’s End. And in the show, I got to ride a bike on stage and one night, we got upstaged by a pod of dolphins.

I can offer you spectacle of a different kind in The Coppergate Woman and can’t wait to show you what we’ve created.

The Coppergate Woman is at York Theatre Royal from 30 July to 7 August. Box office 01904 623568/ yorktheatreroyal.co.uk