How should the Edinburgh Fringe respond to the climate crisis? An actor and a playwright discuss

Janie Dee | Richard Lakos

Janie Dee

The Edinburgh Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world, so to make it environmentally friendly is no mean feat. But I truly believe that this festival can be an environmentally friendly place. It’s said that the environmental crisis is profoundly a crisis of imagination, and where better to confront a crisis of imagination than at the biggest carnival of creativity on the planet?

It’s been eye-opening to take my show Beautiful World Cabaret to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. I have thought really carefully about the costs (environmental and otherwise!) and tried to question absolutely everything. What are those giant posters printed on? Do we need new sets and costumes? Where does it all go when everything ends?

Marketing is an area where productions can leave a heavy footprint. We’re all familiar with the giant show posters that cover the city in August, but what is their impact? I was thrilled that Out of Hand, the printing company behind the boards, were keen to collaborate with us. They work hard to be as sustainable as possible, whilst also being affordable and accessible to artists, reusing purpose built structures every year, recycling all the plastic correx boards after the festival and no longer using water as ballast in structures.

But I wanted to know if we could push it further. Turns out we could! For Beautiful World Cabaret, all our outdoor posters have been printed directly onto wood, using the latest digital printing technology. The wood is from sustainable sources and will be reused after the Fringe, so nothing is going to landfill. Even more excitingly we co-commissioned an Edinburgh-based artist to hand paint one of the Festival Towers – totally removing the need for using print machinery. Out of Hand are now hoping to offer both these alternatives more widely to artists and companies at next year’s fringe and beyond.

My personal ambition is to remove all single use plastic from the festival, and I really think it can be done. It was great to hear about the Fringe Society and Pleasance’s plans to install water fountains, something as simple as giving audiences a place to refill their reusable water bottle can have a huge impact. One change I’ve made personally is I’ve completely stopped wearing makeup, because of the plastic packaging. Every day I go out on stage make-up free, I’m not even wearing any on my posters!

I came to Edinburgh with the most talented company of world-class musicians and singers to celebrate our beautiful world. I think it is common - and understandable - to look at the magnitude of the climate crisis and feel powerless. Each day we invite a guest from the world of art and activism, to shine a light on the astonishing individuals who make a massive difference - and I hope their stories inspire and empower our audiences.

What we need to remember and try to plant firmly at the foundation of everything, including this festival, is that things cannot be thrown “away”. There is no “away”. We need to start making things with the end goal in sight. The big change needs to come from governments and corporations, companies and venues. Of course it does. But small changes really do make a difference - if next year every company could switch to recycled paper flyers, wouldn’t that be fantastic?

All the world’s a stage, let’s protect it!

Janie Dee's Beautiful World Cabaret, Pleasance Dome, 2.20pm, until 26 August

Lewis Hetherington | Contributed

Lewis Hetherington

The Climate Crisis is a bit like death. It’s everywhere, it’s very hard to face, and in many ways it’s unfathomable. But like death, it’s something we need to accept to make sense being alive right now. And also like death, it’s something that can help us feel the fullness and beauty of life.

Theatre is uniquely placed to help us make sense of the Climate Crisis. Or perhaps it is just that, in this increasingly wild world, theatre can help us face up to the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. And we need all the help we can get.

Whilst I was writing my play no one is coming to save us, two of my closest friends in the world were taken by cancer. Both in their early forties, and both two of the most alive people I’d ever known. Both people who shone brightly, laughed loudly and cared passionately about supporting others and standing up for good in the world.

One was Oliver Emanuel, whose extraordinarily beautiful play The History of Paper is on at the Traverse Theatre this August. The other was Hannah Barker, with whom, as part of Analogue Theatre, I won my first Fringe First back in 2007. They are both vividly present for me throughout this festival. It’s a kind of tender, gut wrenching joy to have them so present in my thoughts.

They both faced death with life. Of course they had their own journeys, but as they travelled their paths they wanted to hear the wind, feel the sun, watch trees grow and share time and space with those they loved. That’s what we turn to, as humans, to cope, the breath of life.

But we’re watching our planet being strangled of life. And, to our collective bafflement, we’re not really doing anything. We’re just not facing it, we’re not facing the scale of it.

And so to theatre, what can that do? It’s hard to say, as the arts continue to endlessly fight for existence, like forests in California caught in accelerating cycles of wildfires.

But what do we turn to at a funeral, at a wedding? Songs drenched in shared memories, poems that capture a feeling, speeches made of tapestries of stories of lives well lived. People being in a space, holding their breath as they listen to a tale; that’s theatre.

Theatre has an ability, a duty perhaps, to gather people round the campfire (metaphorical or not) and say let’s sit with this thing called the Climate Crisis, and share our stories and songs about how it’s affecting our world now. Let’s share our pain and fears, and try to understand, that it is happening, and it’s going to get worse. And we will need to be capable of tremendous kindness and tenacity in the coming years. And we’re not going to get any help with that that from AI, social media, corporate zombies, or most of our current politicians.

Theatre is a space for our empathy and compassion to grow, to expand beyond our selves and our lived experiences, to consider this global emergency.

We’re not doing that at the moment. Not nearly enough. We’re dancing around it. We’re doing lots of feeling bad and navel gazing and being nervous, but we need to just start to stare it in the face. We might get it wrong, we’ll make work some will love and some will dismiss as trite or preachy - but that’s OK! People are moved by different things and always will be.

It’s not theatre’s job to solve the climate crisis, but I think it’s theatre’s job to take an audience by the hand and help us, as it always has done, to face the great challenges and mysteries of what it is to be human, and to imagine the possibilities of what we might become.

Lewis Hetherington's play no one is coming to save us has now finished its Fringe run, but A History of Paper continues at the Traverse Theatre, various times, until 25 August