To make a sustainable Tempest we needed to avoid buying new items, keep our carbon footprint low by minimising deliveries, and adapt and reuse props as much as possible.
We're using the Theatre Green Book – a set of instructions for making theatre more green, and the first piece of advice in the Green Book is to design something out if we don’t need it, after that it’s about using items we already have
We started the props that we needed, looking first in our Prop Store and then around our own buildings. We found unwanted barrels and containers ready for the skip outside the workshop and plenty to use from past shows, including:
- A prop piano, picture used top in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016) and below in The Tempest
- The tarpaulin used in 2022's All’s Well That Ends Well
- Curtains from O, Island! at The Other Place last year
Reusing rubbish
The Tempest is set on an island, surrounded by sea, so collecting items that had been left on the beach or washed up seemed like a good way to source some more props.