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

We chose to trial these guidelines for our 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. We felt the work was artistically suited to this trial and as our first live production post-pandemic, the energy and momentum was there to experiment with new working practices.

We are absolutely delighted to announce that we achieved our target of Baseline Standard for this production, with 53% of our materials having had a previous life and 97% of materials will either be reused or recycled afterwards.

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

Check out our report here:

Tinderbox Theatre Green Book Evaluation_Sylvan

And here is a link to a PDF of the Theatre Green Book Volume 1:

THEATRE-GREEN-BOOK-ONE-Sustainable Productions

We absolutely couldn’t have done this without our amazing creative team and cast. Not only did we ask them to design and create an outdoor, site-specific show in October at night, and our first Live show post-lockdown, we also asked them to trial new sustainable working practices that involved a lot of consideration, planning and learning. They approached everything with so much professionalism and enthusiasm that we were able to achieve something special.

So to Rory Casey, Kerri McGimpsey, Stuart Marshall, Stuart Robinson, James C McFetridge, Enda Kenny, Jonathan M Daley, Ruby Campbell, Seamus O’Hara and Maria Connolly – thank you, thank you, thank you!