Press Contact: Chris Baker
chris.baker@theatreroyal.com
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, by award-winning playwright Miranda Rose Hall, will experiment with sustainable touring models when it tours the UK, including to Theatre Royal Plymouth in summer 2023.
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction will tour across the UK, without people or materials physically travelling. Furthermore, the performance will be powered by bicycles peddled in real time throughout the duration of the show.
Director Katie Mitchell and the creative team will produce blueprints containing sustainability guides which will be given to each subsequent venue in the first off-grid tour of its kind in the UK. Local teams will stage and perform the play, within the parameters of the blueprints and using the same renewable bike technology, therefore eliminating the need for physical travel.
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction is Co-produced by Headlong and the Barbican.
The difference between death and extinction is this: death is to cease to exist. Extinction is to extinguish. I think of death as individual. Extinction is collective.
Naomi is part of a touring theatre company and they have made a play especially for you – those who are living through extinction – except the actors haven’t shown up yet. We don’t know why, and maybe they will, but in the meantime, Naomi has a plan. Miranda Hall’s darkly funny and uplifting play explores what it means to be human in an era of man-made extinction.
Director, Katie Mitchell said: “It’s exciting to be working with Headlong on this production to roll out a radical international touring model across the UK. It’s crucial that we develop new ways of making and touring theatre in response to the existential crisis we are all facing.”
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction is Headlong’s second major touring experiment, part of the company’s ongoing commitment to rethink theatre-making in a climate emergency. In 2020, Headlong produced Signal Fires, a national festival that saw over forty companies come together for the first time to tour a single idea, at a time when traditional touring was not possible.
Headlong have committed to staging one major touring experiment and one piece that explores a different facet of climate change, as part of our commitment to rethinking what it means to be a touring theatre company during the climate emergency.
Ticket information will be released soon.