- Given the emergency that the climate crisis
is thrusting upon us. We, like the rest of society,
needs to up its game and start to be a little more radical
in how we approach our carbon impacts.
(upbeat music)
- "Paradise" is set on a shoreline of an island,
a place where everything and everybody's washed up.
One of the exciting things was that we knew that
the Olivier was going to be in the round,
and that it was going to be more site-specific.
- When you think about a play like "Paradise",
which has its own environmental theme,
it's very interesting what Kae Tempest has done,
where they have created this chorus of island women
who have an ethos to do with looking after the planet,
and the dynamics of the play have to be represented
in the way you make the play.
You can't have one ethos in a play
and then make it not paying attention to
and living by the spirit of that ethos.
- The theatre green book is an initiative
to try and push things forward in terms
of what the theatre was doing
about its environmental impacts.
The baseline standard, which The National Theatre
has signed up to the target of 50% of everything
we use materially on a show to have a previous life
and 65% of it to have an afterlife.
What is paramount is that everyone is talking very early on
from the very early stages of a design.
We don't have all the answers.
I think that's the key thing to say here.
This is an investigation.
- The key elements of the design
of "Paradise" are firstly,
the element of the earth, sand, a beach.
- Two thirds of that full cloth has been used
in about five other shows here at The National.
A third of it is new canvas,
but that will be used in future shows going forward,
so will be stored.
- Then there is the environmental element
of all of the detritus, the rubbish, the plastic,
the things that have washed up on the island.
There's a kind of statement about the way some of these
communities are having to live,
to do with Western materialism,
rocking up and washing up in different places.
- [Rae] Old cans, bits of chain,
some broken masts and broken bits of sail.
So we've literally beachcombed to get that stuff.
All elements in costume, as well,
have been from the store here
or have been used from secondhand clothes shops
or wherever we can find them. Our own donations as well.
- [Paul] In our world,
which is about originality and about design,
inevitably recycling will involve a lot of adaptation
and chopping things up to make something slightly different.
Our scenic art department have been experimenting
for a good number of years with the materials they use
trying to get solvent-based paints out of their practice.
So most paint they use nowadays, if not all of it,
is water based.
The ambition is to try and create a circular economy
so things keep going round and round.
- [Rae] What we're doing
is to not use as much scenery as normal,
to use the environment of the theatre,
to imagine an outside space, and that outside space
works very well in the Olivier,
in the sense of it being like a Greek amphitheatre,
which is the perfect place to tell an ancient tale
of history and adventure.
- Parameters encourage ingenuity,
and when we think about the carbon footprint of theatre,
it's really good to then think, okay,
by applying those parameters, what can we do with less?
- It's not just a single voice of a designer,
it's a collective voice.
No one person knows all the answers.
So you ask everybody all the time, how do we do this?
how do we do it better?
- Theatre production is a truly collaborative practice.
It requires lots of different disciplines coming together
and bringing their specialisms to make the whole thing work.
There's the opportunity for a new creative language
and a way of rethinking how we approach creative work,
and there's a lot of possibility in that.
(upbeat music)