Environmental values: A paradigm for decision making

This year, our Great Big Green Week went something like this: Monday, we welcomed local climate groups into our building, including Net Zero Stratford who offered carbon literacy training in our community space. Tuesday, we launched our first sustainability tour, complementing our familiar backstage tours but with a particular focus on our work to reduce our carbon impact.

On Wednesday, we hosted the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers to demonstrate eco-conscious textile techniques. Thursday, we ran a public workshop on sustainable theatre-making in partnership with Norah’s Ark, a community production of a new medieval mystery play.

And on Friday, we guided participants through a series of water-inspired creative writing activities, exploring imaginative ways to foster a sense of stewardship towards the river which flows through Stratford.  And throughout the week and weekend, our catering team concocted a green dining offer, including a zero-waste pre-show menu and garden-to-glass mocktails and cocktails.

Our welcome space was dedicated to the work of River Home artists, a grassroots movement co-creating work relating to waterways and their wildlife. And all our buildings had notice boards highlighting recent green initiatives and opportunities for audiences and staff to offer ideas and make suggestions for further improvements.

Our environmental journey

So now is a useful moment to reflect on our progress to date before we embark on the next stage of our environmental journey. As a founding partner of Theatre Green Book, the RSC has long been engaged with the transition to sustainable theatre-making and we try to uphold the industry standards it sets out across all our activities. This is reflected in most productions reaching Basic level, and some work in progress moving with increased assurance towards Intermediate.

We’re enjoying a new aesthetic confidence in this work. Shows as stunning as Hamlet Hail To The Thief, that also attain Theatre Green Book status, demonstrate there’s no compromise in the quality of the work. In fact, the creative challenge often leads to more dynamic production choices.

Like many building-based organisations, we work hard across our estate to reduce energy use. We have audited our capacity to move to greener forms of supply, and have a roadmap and timeline to do so.

We are also improving the biodiversity of our outdoor spaces: a recent tree-planting project, the creation of a natural dye garden, and the installation of bug hotels – ingeniously crafted from off-cuts and leftover workshop materials – speak to our efforts to improve the quality of our local environment.

Continues…

Natural dye garden. Photo: Lola Stewart/RSC

Across our operations, we have made substantial progress including a wholesale change in our commercial offer to stock ethical and sustainable products in our shop; a move to a pension fund that incorporates environmental and social factors into its investment decisions; and a review of catering which now supports local and UK-based food and drink suppliers, including English wines and beers.

All these add up to significant carbon-reduction and environmental-improvement impacts, both statistically and qualitatively.

Embedding climate-aware sensibility

As part of my job as associate director with a focus on sustainability, I talk to all departments, joining up conversations and streamlining our efforts. From feedback, I sense we are moving on in our environmental work, from an initial period characterised by specific directives and targets to a phase in which climate-aware sensibility is embedded in our processes and our mindsets.

We are no longer reverse engineering practices to fit; we are adopting environmental values as a paradigm for decision making. That’s not to say there aren’t huge challenges. Our estate remains our most carbon-culpable asset and will require significant investment in the next decade to bring it up to modern environmental standards.

Our resource management – whether of set and costume stores, accommodation or administration – requires streamlining to enable the best use of our extant stores.

And our transport use – both by our workforce (travelling between multiple sites across Stratford, to and from London, on UK tours and on international transfers) and our audiences (public transport to Stratford often frustrates) – continues to pose challenges.

Stories are powerful tools for climate advocacy

A new strand of work is a more public-facing way to explore the challenges that come with living in climate-critical times. While we minimise environmental impact behind the scenes, we’re also attempting to maximise the reach our platform gives us on stage. The stories we tell and the places we present them are powerful tools for climate advocacy.

Increasingly, we realise how audiences value theatre that speaks in thoughtful and dynamic ways about living in a climate-inflected world – for example through the success of Kyoto, now heading to New York, and through the advance interest in The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, coming later in the year.

One of theatre’s great assets is its ability to transport audiences to a place where big ideas are rendered relatable and manageable, in messy, imperfect, funny, provocative, joyful ways. Watching characters on stage wrestle with emotional challenges encourages us all to reach across ideological divisions and cross imaginative thresholds.

It reminds us that the origins of theatre – whether in Asia, ancient Greece or myriad Indigenous societies – lie in public storytelling as a site of civic discourse, a place to deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, through the extraordinary power of the collective imagination.

Gearing up for the challenges ahead

My new co-authored book, Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet, speaks to just that idea; that theatre is a shared space in which to work the mind, body, heart and social imagination to address society’s problems. And this is what audiences want too.

In addition, the work of our Creative Learning and Engagement department with Next Generation continues to remind us of the importance and value of amplifying the voice of younger people in our environmental practice, as we make decisions that will impact their futures.

So, while we take this moment to benchmark our progress and celebrate our many achievements, we are also gearing up for the next challenging few years – both economically and environmentally.