Theatre can often be a really resource intensive business! With actors traveling all over the country, costumes and props being made and looked after, sets being constructed and piles of electrical equipment being used to light the stage and provide sound, the amount of resources used to create and maintain each show can soon begin to add up. And that’s before you’ve even started to think about all the fliers and posters and the journeys that your audience are making to watch the show….
Here at the Library Theatre Company Manchester we’ve always done our bit to be sustainable but now we’re determined to go even further… We’re decided to start thinking about the work we produce on stage from an environmental perspective, starting by recording the resources that we are using to make our work, and then creating strategies to begin working in ways that are as environmentally sustainable as possible.
We started this sustainable journey on our last but one Young Actors’ Company show in April 2010 – A Little Voice a Long Way from Here. On this show we tried to measure all the resources that we used so that we could work out the carbon footprint for each ticket that was sold. It was a complicated process, and by no means exhaustive in our methodology, but we were all pleased to be involved and think the results make interesting reading (they’re attached here if you want to have a look)
So, what next? Well, we’ve applied the same methods (but polished and improved) on our production of A Dolls House and you can read the finished article from the downloads section on this page.