Isolde, who is two years younger than the rest of the students, is forced to attend with the older girls.

The first year students are expected to put on a show of their own creation without the involvement of the instructors.

To make it up to him Isolde takes her parents to Stanley's show, failing to realize what the play is about.

The Rehearsal could be understood as theatre-fiction, which, as Graham Wolfe explains, refers to "novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry".

Louise O'Brien in the Listener wrote of, "a new talent who has arrived fully formed, with an accomplished, confident and mature voice.

Ed Caesar in The Times speaks of The Rehearsal as imperfect, but praises “a starburst of talent”.

[7] Justine Jordan writing for The Guardian called it an "astonishing debut novel", and "a cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original".

“Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal: Theatrical Fantasy and the Gaze.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 49.3 (2016): 91–108.