From cycle-powered lights to recycled sets: how theatre is going green

“Usually at the Barbican a play consumes 80,000 watts for lighting and 30,000 watts for sound,” says director Katie Mitchell. “For this show we’re not going above 500 watts.”

Quite a startling statistic: not least when you consider the size of London’s Barbican stage — mammoth — and that the power will be generated entirely by bicycles. That’s because Mitchell’s A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction is a bold experiment aiming not only to mount a show completely off-grid but to tour it around the country without clocking up a single motorway mile.

Across the theatre industry, many are engaging with the drive towards sustainable practice and carbon neutrality. The Theatre Green Book, collated during lockdown and co-ordinated by Paddy Dillon, laid out guidance and targets for artists and companies seeking to work more sustainably. Major recent productions, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest and Rusalka at the Royal Opera House, have put these into practice, creating sets and costumes from recycled and repurposed items.

Mitchell has already worked on A Play for the Living . . . in Europe, sending the show from country to country without shifting cast, crew or sets, in a groundbreaking initiative called Sustainable Theatre?. Now it makes its UK premiere at the hands of pioneering touring company Headlong. That presents a sizeable challenge, given the touring norm of trucking stuff; it also means the show itself will have to shrink and expand depending on the size of the stage.

“We’re trying to apply it to a standard touring model,” says Holly Race Roughan, artistic director of Headlong. “So we’re creating a blueprint at the Barbican and on the ground each theatre team will recreate that blueprint. The shows will feel bespoke for the city and location, but they should also speak to each other. It’s a big experiment.”

Onstage, as the central performer — Lydia West at the Barbican — delivers the play, she will be accompanied by a group of intrepid cyclists, pedalling for dear life to keep the lights on. While a couple of fixed bikes might do the job in a studio theatre, the Barbican is an energy-hungrier space. “We decided on eight bikes and then, after some wattage tests, we upgraded to 10,” says Race Roughan. “There are about 20 cyclists involved, because it’s quite hardcore. You’ve got to be fit.”

A playful set design by Moi Tran will demonstrate how much power is being generated at any given moment, using an onstage wattage counter and circuit. “There is wattage wrangling to do,” says Race Roughan. “If we want to have video in this moment, but we also want sound, then we probably have to dim the lights.”

For Mitchell, it’s not the first adventure in pedal-powered art. In 2021 she staged Houses Slide, the first-ever bike-powered classical concert, with even the soprano cycling furiously; she also directed Duncan Macmillan’s play Lungs at the Berlin Schaubühne with the two actors generating power throughout. “We had to train them like athletes,” she says. “They had to have steaks and pasta.”

The current project fuses form with content. In the play itself, by American writer Miranda Rose Hall, a solo character tries to improvise her way through a drama about extinction. The subject matter is grave, but the script is warm and often funny. The light touch, audience engagement and practical examples are important for Mitchell, whose work has engaged with climate emergency for more than a decade. She learned from staging science-based shows such as Ten Billion (2012) and 2071 (2014).

“Frightening people doesn’t work . . . It is important not to beat people over the head with data and statistics which terrify them further and make them shut down,” she says. “With this show we’re celebrating what we can do with very small wattage. So we’ve got two screens, we’re doing two simultaneous projections, we have very loud music. Sustainable theatre doesn’t need to be ‘poor theatre’.”

Tom Piper, who designed the RSC’s recent The Tempest, agrees with Mitchell that sustainability does not mean sparseness. “It’s not just about reducing everything to a bare space and a chair: you can make beautiful and flamboyant theatre in an environmentally friendly way. The Tempest was one of the most visually spectacular shows I’ve done.”

That show also fused content and design, setting Shakespeare’s play in the context of the current climate emergency. Prospero’s island began the evening strewn with washed-up rubbish and ended with nature resurgent. “It was trying to be hopeful and redemptive,” says Piper. “Environmental theatre doesn’t need doom and gloom: it can offer the possibility of a hope and a way forward.”

He deployed genuine litter and reused elements of his previous sets. “A lot of it is about being versatile in your design process, and about investing in people to recraft things.”

There are many tricky thickets yet to negotiate, however. Widescale reuse of set materials, for example, would require spacious central storage, raising both practical and financial questions. Meanwhile, for touring companies, there’s the carbon footprint of moving kit, crew and cast around the country.

That’s the issue Headlong is looking to eliminate. Each venue will recreate A Play for the Living . . . afresh on the ground, with a new creative team following a precise set of guidelines. But can you really define that as a tour, rather than a series of revivals?

The shows will have a “shared DNA” says Race Roughan. “I think there will be enough similarities to pull it together as a tour. I would describe [the shows] as siblings rather than twins; they will have a shared aesthetic.”

Mitchell says that this model, far from being restrictive, fosters innovative, decentralised working methods and prompts engagement at a deeper level: “It insists that every theatre has the conversation afresh as opposed to just receiving a product. That invites them more deeply into the conversation about climate change and sustainability.”

The show is one experiment among many in making greener theatre, she adds. And it’s certainly not intended to be prescriptive: “I don’t think you could plonk this structure on to a tour of a complex musical or opera. It’s just about asking the question: ‘Is there a more sustainable way of doing this?’”

So could the findings have wider application? “I would love to have a conversation with people in the business world about these models,” Mitchell replies. “But in a really warm, inviting way. Because the arts are just so good at pushing forward creatively.”

Barbican Theatre, London, April 26-29, then touring, barbican.org.uk