Rift
Rift is the company run by Felix Mortimer and Joshua Nawras, a team who, like others among these award recipients, place their emphasis on telling stories—and stories without boundaries, creating whole worlds for their audience to explore breaking the usual strictures of space, place and time.
Their work has usually involved a controlled and carefully constructed journey for each member of the audience.
O Brave New World was a version of The Tempest staged in half-hour episodes in a sequence of different installations, culminating in accompanying Prospero down Regent’s Canal. The Trial, inspired by Kafka, began in Shoreditch Town Hall but was followed by the solo participant’s arrest in the street and tense situations across Hoxton and then at a later date attendance for trial and its outcome in another part of Hackney.
Macbeth was staged in a Goldfinger-designed East London tower block where the audience went through a rift in space and time to enter a new world where they had to pass border control and even change the currency they had in their pockets.
With a 90-person audience split to see a complicated sequence of partly simultaneous scenes, which required duplicate performers, it was a production of enormous complexity.
The award was made for this production of Macbeth.