Immersive theatre-makers Rift are set to stage a site-specific performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth that will take place overnight. Rift plans to stage the all-night Macbeth in east London tower block in an innovative move to put audiences to sleep – and then wake them up.
The audience will be asked to go to bed after the first few scenes of Shakespeare’s murderous production on the top floor of an iconic east London tower block and throughout the night, they will be visited by the play’s characters as they present the events around the murder, and its consequences. The play will conclude in the morning as the audience wakes for the final act.
This new production will begin by meeting the three witches in an underground car park and it will run for two months from the summer solstice in June, beginning at 8pm and finishing 12 hours later. Rift are not the first company to turn Macbeth into such an immersive experience. Punchdrunk transformed the play in 2003, when Sleep No More received its first UK performances at the Beaufoy Building, an old Victorian school in south London. The production was revived in 2011 in New York, where it has been running ever since.
The company is led by director Felix Mortimer, who has previously staged similar productions of The Tempest, which became a six-part pop-up installation in a London shop, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which was spread over two locations in east London.
Originally known as Retz, the company Rift was founded in 2010. This all-night performance of Macbeth seems set to take audiences by storm as they immerse themselves into the lives and deaths of the Macbeth family in one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.