Posted on July 23rd, 2025
In short, Climate Dramaturgy means everyone in a production working together to make choices that are more climate positive and having these conversations from the very start of a process. At every stage of recruitment, the ambition was made clear to the freelancers who worked on the show to try to make climate-positive choices wherever possible. Acknowledging that this was an evolving practice, empowering the creative team to live and own this practice in the making of the show is the key thing. Everyone was encouraged to try, whilst recognising that sometimes we would all fail – but even then, there would be useful learnings to take forward.
A new part of the design process to me was the Green Card. We saw an early version of the design concept, and could ask questions about materials, provoke thinking, share some of both the exciting things about the design and look at some of the challenges in bringing it to life in the eye. It was about beginning the process with environmental action at its heart. It was at this meeting that we found out that two of the venues we were touring to had some wood from previous sets they were looking at getting rid of. Ultimately, we ended up using the floor from Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds pantomime, Snow White.
Climate Dramaturgy in many ways is a Chapter 0 to the Theatre Green Book. It sets out a way of thinking, and a permission to think in that way, that will allow you to go on to think more deeply about your choices. As with every production at HighTide, we complete a tracker from Theatre Green Book to assess how well we can meet and this fell as one of my responsibilities as the new General Manager.
We were aiming to meet the Baseline target from the Theatre Green Book – which requires 50% of the materials used in your production to be from reused or recycled materials. Being able to reuse the panto floor like this is key to reducing the amount of virgin materials that go into making a set. We also reused wood from another production that our designer had recently worked on. This is great evidence that having these early conversations means that the creatives always have environmental action in their minds when thinking about realising their design.
Whilst this is a big win for both the climate and the budget, using recycled materials is not without its challenges. Repurposing someone’s pantomime floor isn’t always the most straightforward of tasks and for us certainly took longer than if we were to have used virgin materials. Sometimes time efficiency has to be sacrificed to achieve a lower carbon impact, but that is of course not without its own knock ons to timelines, budgets, workload etc.
In the end, 64% of our set and scenery materials were reused or recycled materials meaning we hit our Baseline Target. 97% of these went into our storage in Suffolk to be reused again or to be recycled with a local company we have a connection with. We are lucky to have a reasonably priced store which gives us this flexibility, but certainly for our future productions we should give some further consideration to the future life of our set builds. If there are opportunities to recycle the set closer to the location of its final performance, this is an opportunity definitely worth taking.
Costume is historically a little simpler than set to source second hand as it’s much easier to raid charity shops for second hand clothes than it is for wood, paint, etc. 83% of our costumes were recycled or reused, with 100% of them either going on to be stored or donated locally. We’re attuned to the particular difficulty in sourcing shoes across the sector, so in our recent tidy of the store, we catalogued the size of each shoe and took pictures so we can make sure we don’t lose sight of this real win.
The sourcing of technical equipment was trickier; this production required 30 modified LED candles to be the primary lighting source. We were able to reuse the candles from the production the year prior, but a lot of the additions to be able to turn them on and off in a believable way were purchased new. Additionally, we used an LED kicker to boost the light levels and have more control over the levels of lighting and atmosphere of the show – it’s a ghost story after all and it’s got to be spooky! And typically, if something breaks or fails on the road then a replacement is needed pretty pronto. We did borrow some equipment via our Production Manager’s contacts and also some dollies from our pals at Eastern Angles, which kept to a limit the amount we needed to purchase firsthand. And when we produce the third and final iteration of this touring model, we know exactly what kit we have already and can share these parameters with the creative team.
Based on Julie’s Bicycle defaults, our audience travel, regularly cited as the largest emissions contributor, doubled vs the tour in 2023/24. The prior model was more focused around smaller, non-traditional theatres so there is some logic to this but there is clearly an opportunity for HighTide to develop its gathering of data here, including venue partnerships. Audience feedback surveys can sometimes be a little dry, but they really do help us to understand our impact and make more informed choices, particularly linked to reducing our emissions which we know matters to you. Touring to locations in the East of England that have less access to public transport will inevitably lead to more audience members travelling by car. However, reaching people across all of the East is central to our mission, and finding means to continue doing so whilst decreasing our carbon impact will evolve as part of our practice.
Taking part in this process for the first time, it confirmed to me that clear expectations and careful planning is great: it allows you to make climate positive decisions, and empower others to do the same. Even so, there is no denying that time pressure and finite budget and resources are inhibitors of progress. Living the principles of Climate Dramaturgy means trying, and recognising that we won’t always succeed but learning along the way will help us to continue getting better.
If you’d like to hear more about HighTide’s Environmental Action and the practice of Climate Dramaturgy, you can do so by clicking here. You can read more about the creatives who made More… Ghost Stories by Candlelight here.
