Earlier this year, volume 1 of the Theatre Green Book was launched which focused on Sustainable Productions. For Northern Irish theatre companies, this was the first time that they have had access to tangible guidelines by which to measure and evaluate our environmental sustainability practices.

Tinderbox Theatre Company chose to trial these guidelines for their autumn 2021 production Sylvan. Sylvan was a new writing commission by playwright Jonathan M. Daley and was intended to be staged outdoors in October. The play includes themes relating to the current climate crisis and the run coincided with COP26. They felt the work was artistically suited to this trial and as their first live production post-pandemic, the energy and momentum was there to experiment with new working practices.

Tinderbox managed to achieve their target of Baseline Standard for this production, with 53% of their materials having had a previous life and 97% of materials will either be reused or recycled afterwards.

They have published a full report on their experience using the Theatre Green Book in order to share their learning and hopefully encourage other similarly sized theatre companies to try it out.

Find the full report here. 

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