Founded by Aonghus Óg McAnally, Rise Productions' debut show Fight Night by Gavin Kostick won both the Best Actor and the Bewley's Little Gem awards at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2010. Following a successful six week run at Bewleyʼs Café Theatre, it returned for a 25 date national tour, including a week at the prestigious Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, and was nominated Best New Play at the Irish Times Theatre Awards. It returned in 2012 for a summer festival tour, including headlining the Theatre Tent at Electric Picnic, and international tours to both Glasgow and Finland. Rise Productions again collaborated with Gavin Kostick for The Games People Play, which had a sold-out run in September 2013 and went on to win Best New Play at the Irish Times Theatre Awards. It returned in 2015 for an extensive 20 venue nationwide tour. At The Ford, the concluding instalment in this trilogy of plays with Kostick, will receive its world premiere at Dublin Theatre Festival 2015. Rise also created Tear Down The Walls, a site specific piece mixing installation and live performance, for Dublin Theatre Festival 2011. Rise has produced two short films, Just Saying and The Difficult Second Album, both for the Irish Times Theatre Awards ceremony. The groundbreaking Rise Productions: Irish Theatre Podcast, a series of weekly interviews with leading theatre artists, quickly became the number 1 arts podcast in the country, and is now on the official drama syllabus at Yale University and NUI Galway. Rise Productions have also produced two ten-part series of Rise: Audio Drama, which also topped the podcast charts.
