Charlotte ClaydonGoldy Notay, Ameet Chana, Shabana Azmi, Clara Indrani in Happy Birthday Sunita. Image by Helen Maybanks
The RTYDS is certainly a great way to be working with young directors as Kumar explains: ‘One of our contexts at the moment is to really look at the next generation of artists, especially British Asian artists. We really want to encourage and give opportunities, so it fits in really well with what we are doing. We’ve been doing this for a while but what the RTYDS has done is really given it a push in the right direction.’
As part of the RTYDS, Rifco worked with Blaise Singh Johal. Johal was an emerging director who had a background in digital media, but wanted to get into theatre and ‘get hands on experience’. ‘It’s been really good because he’s challenged me into thinking in new ways and I’ve done the same for him.’ says Kumar, ‘He’s worked on two projects with us now. We did Happy Birthday Sunita, where he was mainly observing and working with the cast and he’s been more hands on with Mummy Ji Presents, which we are doing now at the Birmingham REP. He’s doing our next project as well!’.
With all the exciting things happening for Rifco, it’s good to reflect on how it first began; ‘We started in the late 90’s. It was a group of friends who were actors, we all got together and we just wanted to work.We did something very close to our hearts, something our families wanted to watch and by accident we took on this new audience that weren’t really going to the theatre, they were going to see stand up and a few comedy nights. They didn’t want to see anything that was too wordy. What we did was we hit upon this new audience and we’ve managed to grow with them. That’s stayed with us.’
He continues, ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing to be honest! I was an actor, I wanted to do work, but what we did was stumble through it in the early days. It’s really important to find a mentor, someone in the business who knows what they are doing, which is what I did. You need to ask all the questions you can think of and take if from there. There’s a lot of hard work involved as well. It’s a hard business this one, you have to be a workaholic and you have to be really hungry for it too.’.
Pravesh Kumar
Rifco has experienced challenges along the way: ‘When we are booking shows or making new pieces of work, it’s other theatres having that same courage to book us. New writing is always difficult as there is no ‘brand’ to sell, you and your company become the brand.’ explains Kumar. Despite this Rifco has achieved great success over the years, ‘we’ve done some amazing new writing. Britian’s Got Bhangra did hugely well across the board with a whole British audience and got great reviews. What was great about that was that our whole team was new! Another of our great successes is that we’ve brought quite a few new young people into the business. We had a guy work with us at the age of sixteen. He was so great and so passionate that we kept him and he stayed with us for about five or six years, working on all of our productions. Now, he’s in the business as a stage manager working with some of the biggest companies across the country. That’s a real achievement for us!’
Talking about the future for Rifco he says, ‘We want to carry on doing great work and really encouraging new, emerging talent. That’s one of our big focuses in the next couple of years.’
From speaking to Kumar it is obvious his passion for working with new talent. The fact that Rifco is doing so well is a real testament to what working with young talent can do and bring to British theatre and why schemes like the RTYDS are so important.
To find out more go to Rifco Arts and RTYDS