Fringe work with sharp edges, live wires, and no interest in playing safe.
Northlight is a small producing company making new writing, rebuilt classics, and late-night performance in a reconfigurable riverside room. We like actors close, sound in the open, and an audience that can feel the room thinking.
In rehearsal now
Medea / Machine
A chorus-driven rebuild with live processing, scaffold towers, and an audience wrapped around the playing space.
Coming up
Open workshop
Devising call, late April.
120
seats, if we keep the chairs in
9
projects across theatre and live art
11pm
latest regular curtain time
Start here
A clearer way into the company, whether you want a night out, a room to make work in, or a reason to back the next project.
For audiences
Book a night that feels close, live, and specific to this room.
If you like seeing performers work without much distance, start with the season and the upcoming late-night run.
Browse the programmeFor artists
Find the workshops, open calls, and development spaces where the next projects begin.
Northlight builds work through rehearsals, workshops, and mixed-experience rooms before a formal production is fixed.
See how the room worksFor supporters
Back a company that keeps access, risk, and new work in the same conversation.
The mailing list is the easiest way into programme drops, fundraising updates, and ways to support what gets made next.
Join the list2026 programme
Built for audiences who like performance to feel immediate, unstable, and worth arguing about.
Rebuilt classic
Medea / Machine
A stripped, amplified version of the play staged with live sound, hard lighting, and a chorus that never leaves the room.
New writing
Night Bus to Deptford
A fast, funny, uneasy new play about missed stops, bad timing, and the people who keep talking after midnight.
Late-night series
Quiet Acts for Loud Rooms
Short-form performance, live score, and visiting artists working close to the audience with no fixed stage line.
Artistic note
“We want the audience close enough to notice the choices, the effort, and the danger in the room.”
Northlight makes theatre with its mechanics visible. Operators are part of the picture, text is treated as live material, and the room is allowed to stay raw where rawness tells the truth.
What kind of company this is
- Programming
- New writing, rebuilt classics, live-art crossover, and occasional music-led nights after the mainstage run.
- Scale
- Small audiences, close sightlines, and staging that changes shape depending on the work rather than the other way round.
- Process
- Workshop-led development, open calls, and rehearsal rooms that leave space for experiment without losing rigour.
- Audience
- People who come for theatre, noise, text, design, or simple curiosity and are willing to sit close to the action.
Plan your visit
The room changes with the work.
Some nights are seated end-on. Some are traverse. Some put the band in the middle and the audience around the edge. The foyer bar opens early, the queue is part of the atmosphere, and nothing about the building feels over-managed.
- Venue
- The Old Foundry, Riverside Quay
- Room
- 120 seats, reconfigured per production
- Tickets
- From GBP12, low-income and under-25 allocations held each week
- Access
- Step-free access, relaxed performances, captioned dates each season
Press response
“Northlight understands that intimacy is a formal choice, not a budget limitation.”
The Riverside Ledger
“The best fringe rooms feel as if anything could fail or fly. Northlight knows how to use that charge.”
North Quarter Review
Do you only cast trained performers?
Can I work on shows without being on stage?
What kind of work suits the room?
Mailing list
Hear about the next thing before it settles into a press release.
Get programme drops, booking windows, workshop calls, and notes from inside development periods while the work is still changing shape.