Cloudcuckooland | Blog

Trying to take a show to the Edinburgh Festival without trashing the planet - Part One

July 5th

Having created a madcap childrens show, which has evolved into having something of an eco message (giant chickens roasting Gordon Brown until he agrees to their climate change demands is quite a finale) I feel slightly nauseous whenever the terms ‘environmental’ and ‘responsibility’ come too close in a sentence at the moment, particular with any reference to the Edinburgh Festival.

It all started with the best of intentions. We were creating a ‘total theatre’ modern version of Aristophanes’ Birds – lots of music, tumbling, audience participation, puppets, mess and general anarchic and Aristophanic comedy. The original 2000 year old play is about two guys who are thoroughly fed up with the city they live in – taxes, litigation, red tape – and decide to go and found a perfect city in the sky with the birds. So Stephen Sharkey, our writer, set to work on our modern version for kids, all about setting off to found the perfect city, and inevitably the kids he spoke to said the thing they hated most about the cities they lived in was pollution and mess. Fair point. And in our modern version, when the humans turn up to meet the birds, they are – quite obviously - less keen on humans than they were 2000 years ago, after two millennia of being stuffed for Sunday lunch and having their habitats destroyed by human antics. And thus our mad cap musical became a parable (albeit an irreverent, satire packed one) for human environmental responsibility.

So, when – after a brief tour to try the show out – we found ourselves with the opportunity of taking the show to the Edinburgh Festival for a month of Pleasance courtyard shenanigans, should I have immediately calculated the environmental impact (all that travel, fliering, theatre lighting…) and kept us closer to home? To be utterly honest, it didn’t cross my mind. Which was possibly the first hypocrisy.

I like to think of myself as average to good on the scale of environmental responsibility (which places me higher on that than I am on any other scale of responsibility). But I am no saint. I have been known to take unnecessary flights. I gave up on reusable nappies at the first poo. I often forget to carry a bag and end up having to use a plastic one. So maybe I am not the person who ought to be preaching at small children about their environmental responsibilities, unless I can undergo some regenerative transformation in the next few weeks.

July 6th

So – I have started with a list of every area of our show and practice which needs examination: travel, lighting, disposable props, marketing, and so it goes on. I have two copies of the ecologist, several eco URLs and the phone number of a friend at the Environmental Agency to hand and operation ‘minimise negative environmental impact of trip to Edinburgh’ starts here. I ask someone working for us to phone the carbon trust for advice. He is bemused by the request, they are bemused by his call, but they are very nice to each other. I put ‘environmental responsbility’ as item three on the agenda for our forthcoming production meeting and it elicits email responses of confusion and derision from two members of the production team. Oh dear. I may have to win over my own team first. Anyway. Small steps. I am retiring to bed determined to have an opinion on whether carbon offsetting is a ‘valuable solution’ or ‘good for nothing but reducing guilt’ by tomorrow morning.

July 10th

Travel is not as disastrous as it could be. I have the company going by train, which seems the least evil way to travel, and I ask a slightly bewildered colleague to check out the eco credentials of the van we are hiring for the set. I still don’t definitively know if I think offsetting is a good thing, but I offset the train and van just in case via a website that looks like it is the real thing. I vow to re read all the articles I have now collated on the pros and cons of offsetting. Then I remember the harpist is driving. So I offset that. The drummer phones. He wants to drive. I try to persuade him to take the train. I try to force him to take the train by saying he won’t be able to park in Edinburgh. We leave it unresolved. So far so good.
I ponder briefly the bigger question of touring theatre – what is gained by the social and cultural exchange of arts travelling around the world and coming together in festivals and hubs for dialogue and celebration – versus the inevitable impact of the whole thing.
Then one of the cast calls. He has to attend a Christening back in Wales the day we are travelling to Edinburgh. Can he travel from Cardiff to Edinburgh instead of get the train from London? He can get an evening flight he tells me, with bmi baby. I make vague comments about the environment. He assures me that the flight is cheaper than the train. I pretend that isn’t relevant. I have an employer dilemma; immediately renege on my ‘we don’t fly if its not necessary’ company policy or refuse to let someone go to a Christening. Employees religious practices and general happiness versus environmental responsibility. In employer top trumps I don’t know which trumps which. I cave in immediately and book the flight. I hurriedly offset it. I have become a quick example of offsetting as guilt disposal. I read an article in the Economist archive about just how evil flying is and how much carbon it pumps out compared to anything else on my ‘worry’ list. I worry.

July 12th

I get an email from the guy handling our marketing, who after my ten hysterical times of me calling to check our fliers are being printed on recycled paper (and a bit of wittering about whether recycled paper or paper from sustainable sources was actually what we wanted) has emailed me the receipt from the printers as proof. At least something is going to plan.
But I immediately have visions of the Royal Mile and the millions of performers thrusting fliers at passers by relentlessly from dawn to dusk – the bins at the end of the mile overflowing with discarded fliers…. It is a fiesta of wasted paper. I remember I haven’t been to the festival for five years. Perhaps it has changed. Perhaps the council now provide people to run around collecting all the discarded fliers and getting them recycled. Perhaps now everyone bluetooths their fliers. Or just stands and shouts. Or chalks on the floor. Perhaps paper is a so long gone. I search the edfringe site to see if the festival has any kind of environmental policy. A search on ‘environmental’ throws up three things – how to attend a PR event about the Adelaide Fringe, how to get a street performer pass and an archive article about the Arches in Glasgow. Maybe not. I’ll ring them tomorrow and ask.

July 14th

I am priming myself for meeting our lighting designer and talking about things. It occurs to me that theatre lighting is a pretty darn huge environmental sin – burning electricity just to look pretty – and wonder if we should just cut the whole lighting design. But I am not quite brave enough. Yet. I live with a lighting designer and am not ready to consign him to the environmental naughty step wholesale. So I read the Arcola website (the first UK theatre to be carbon netural) and leave a message on their Chief Exec.s phone, asking for some advice.

I speak to the stage manager about props, particularly ‘disposable’ props. There are a lot of balloons in the show and I ask her to look into the ethics of balloons – are there biodegrable ones? Ones from recycled plastic? And, obviously, how much do they cost.
Shaving foam is also concerning me. The designer and I devoted hours and hours of our time to how our giant on-stage birds should poo. We tried everything from ping pong balls fired from tennis ball machines, to burp guns (we actually tried to illegally import some air guns from American by mistake) to washing up liquid bottles of slop. We finally hit on shaving foam, secreted in costumes which dribbles very convincingly from the actors into nice big piles of bird poo on the floor. The kids love it. But all this was before my new found environmental responsibilities and now I am vaguely aware that cans of shaving foam probably do not fit into an eco plan. Or do they? Could they? Our stage manager rightly points out that given that we have a crate of the stuff in store from the tour, it might be more criminal not to use it up.
I have my first moment of utter despair. I don’t know the parameters of what I am trying to achieve. Where on the scale from ‘I use the right light bulbs, recycle and take the train’ to ‘eco warrior’ do I need to be to justify offering up this piece of theatre.

July 20th
Stage manager has researched latex balloons and assures me they biodegrade faster than an oak leaf, and in fact help the soil…. (I can’t remember the rest, but it sounded plausible). Phew.

July 25th – pre Edinburgh chaos
Lighting designer assures me that the fact we use many rechargeable practicals rather than lights in the rig means we are burning less electricity. I wonder if this is true. On the ‘to research’ list. He makes the most beautiful bird lanterns at my request, and stays up all night to cut the little bird silhouettes out of the lampshades then wire them up. He has red eyes and is very pale. I hope he is right and these aren’t environmentally sinful, as they are very beautiful.

July 28th
We have made it to Edinburgh. I notice the cast are getting better at recycling, or maybe it is just that they keep facetiously pointing it out to me. I like the Pleasance bins which split rubbish into recycling and landfill, just to remind you where non recycled rubbish ends up.
We are trying to find A3 pads, spiral bound, to replace some in the show which are battered and can’t find any in Edinburgh which are recycled. Fatigue stage manager has tried everywhere. Contemplate looking online.
Fliers arrive. We explain to our street team of flier-ers that they are less shiny than the other companies fliers because they are made of recycled paper. Half of them nod approvingly, the other half look at us like we are aging hippies.