Performance

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

2021, Newlyn Green

During the pandemic we began working on a project for children and young people based on Frankenstein. The place turned into a version of Coleridge’s classic adapted to explore people’s relationship to nature.

Children doing the beach clean at the beginning of RIME

MSND

2019, Alexandra Palace

Taking over the basement spaces of the historic Alexandra Palace we transformed them in a dusty forest for a promenade production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set on the eve of the birth of Television.

 

The Trial

2013, Shoreditch Town Hall

With funding from SkyArts this piece began in Shoreditch Town Hall and took participants into the footsteps of Kafka’s Joseph K. alone across Hoxton to visit lawyers and priests and eventually to The Department of Digital Privacy where they had to plead their innocence to crimes they had not committed.

Macbeth

2014, Balfron Tower

With witches spilling out of the garages and a knife fight on the roof, the events of Shakespeare’s Macbeth took place in real time across Ernö Goldfinger’s iconic Balfron Tower.

Audience members stayed overnight eating latkes and borscht with betrayl and tragedy for pudding.

The witches meet Macbeth

Confess your sins to the priest during ‘The Trial’

O Brave New World

297 Hoxton Street, 2012

Taking over an east London shop, we told the story of Shakespeare’s The Tempest episodically over six months, reinstalling our shop as a dive bar, supercomputer, junkshop with a hidden railway, dilapidated hotel, library and ferry terminal. Each month audiences saw a different chunk of the play as the cast of characters slowly found each other. Eventually meeting on a boat in Regent’s Canal.

The Wall

Shoreditch Town Hall, 2012

The Wall is an alternate world, filled with cartoonish characters and split down the middle. One side poor revolutionary Borduria; the other the faded grandeur of aristocratic Syldavia. This is fiction. This is Eastern Europe. This is the 1970s.

Styx

Styx, 2015

Written by Thomas McMullan, Styx the play was an immersive audio tour starting in a crematorium centred on loss.

The play finished with audience members shooting down the river styx in coffins.

Festivals

Shakespeare in Shoreditch

2014 and 2016, Various Locations Across Shoreditch

Two festivals commissioning 14 new plays from writers as diverse as Charlene James, Sabrina Mahfouz and Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

We commissioned three anthologies of these plays one including the project ‘Annie’s 1000 Plays’ where playwright Annie Jenkins wrote 1000 plays while in a shed at the festival hub.

The 90s Season

Styx, 2017

We brought three plays from the era of In-yer-face to STYX to celebrate the theatre of the 1990s. Blasted (Dir. Alastair Pidsley), Normal (Dir. Emma Baggott) and The Skriker (Dir. Gruff Theatre) each ran for two weeks accompanied by a live version of an episode of Friends.

Alongside this we ran a writer’s programme working with a writer born in each year of the 1990s and staging their ten minute plays as part of two events.

Normal which got **** in the Guardian.

Kalidescope Festival

Alexandra Palace, 2018

We build a 1950s film studio in the basement of Ally Pally and saw 1800 people enjoy being stars of stage and screen and staying for the caberet.


Community Payback, Hoxton Street Gardens

Shuffle Festival

St. Clements Hospital, 2013

In the run up to our production of Macbeth we built a forbidden forest in the Old St. Clement’s Hospital and filled it with witches as part of Danny Boyle’s Shuffle Festival.

 

Immersive Theatre Specialists

We have worked in Town Halls, Libraries, Tower Blocks, Playgrounds, Pie and Mash Shops and urban back streets. We believe in bringing theatre to the people and using real life as a backdrop.

 

  • The sense not just of being in Prospero's private space but of going right into his head is acute, and the performance sets up a dynamic between real and imaginary worlds, inside and out, and what happens when different ways of thinking collide. I'll long remember the moment when chaos bursts through the library stack.

    Lyn Gardner

  • All in all it couldn’t have been more perfect.

  • Astounding … A triumph ... subtle, slick.

  • An extraordinary evening of disorientation, intimidation and fascination.

  • [RIFT] stands out - the attention to deail, the control, and more than anything else the set, which is outstanding, grips from first to last. Here is a project in the East End that justifies its weighty funding.

  • Exhilarating… Hugely Ambitious

  • Creation of a near-constant high level of anxiety in surveillance heavy London is a masterstroke and would surely pass muster with Kafka himself.

  • RIFT took performances to the alley ways, parks and homes of Shoreditch to present Shakespeare-inspired theatre written by brilliant playwrights and produced by some of the Uk's best theatre companies. Receiving fantastic reviews and attracting audiences of over a hundred every evening, the unique festival was a roaring success.

    David Byrne

  • Hackney’s Cultural Development Team is delighted to express support for Shakespeare in Shoreditch. This organisation is fast emerging as one of Hackney’s most exciting new creative forces.

    Lucy McMememy, Cultural Programme Officer

  • Emerging from the River Styx, coin in hand, slightly bleary-eyed, RIFT’s short piece is over. But, whether on account of how personal the experience is, or how memorable the production, or how moving the text, RIFT’s show sticks with you, making it difficult for your mind to leave the dingy underworld the company creates a considerable time after you take the boat journey back to the real world.

  • It was a pleasure to work with RIFT on our recent ‘Festival of Osiris’ special event, which saw them bring the myth of Osiris to life through a participatory procession through the Great Court. The piece that the team devised was well researched and beautifully crafted, and the actors’ performance and interaction with the audience was bold and engaging. From the first meeting onwards, there was a clear appreciation of the importance of working with the Museum’s source material, and the challenges of the logistical considerations of the Museum’s unique spaces, and this led to a productive and exciting collaboration.

    Rosie Dalgado

 

Shakespeare in Shoreditch

To mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2014 and the the 400th anniversary of his birth in 2016 we commissioned and produced 14 new plays by some of the UK’s leading writing talents.