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Sustainability Case Study: Entertaining Mr Sloane

June 10, 2026

At the Young Vic, we are committed to ensuring that everything we do is as environmentally responsible and sustainable as possible. We see an important connection between our Climate Justice work and our Racial Justice work, since climate change disproportionately impacts those in the Global South and is a legacy of industrial expansion and extraction across the world.

We work with Theatre Green Book, an industry-wide initiative to work more sustainably in response to the climate crisis, and we are currently aiming for all of our Young Vic productions to reach their Basic standard. This requires at least 50% of show materials to be second-hand and 65% to go on to have a future life.

For Entertaining Mr Sloane we are pleased that we massively exceeded this target and achieved a whopping 84% of items having previous life and 92% having future life across set, costume and props combined.

How did we do it?

Step 1: Theatre Green Book’s Basic Standard was outlined as a parameter with all

members of the Technical and Creative Team from the very beginning of the process.

Step 2: The design was analysed for any and all opportunities to be more sustainable:

  • Could we get a second hand carpet?
  • What scenery did we have in stock that could be repurposed?
  • It’s period costume, so could these be hired or sourced second-hand rather than newly made?

Step 3: We got to work!

Step 4: All data was tracked by our wonderful Technical Team.

Step 5: As we prepared the production, we also reached out to a variety of people to see if they may want to take some items after the show ended.

MKT - Sustainability

Key successes

Our highlight of this project was working with the wonderful PropUp, who rehomed the majority of the charred furniture and props used to create a set. These pieces went on to future lives with charities like Petit Miracles and Habitat for Humanity – as well as to support other theatre productions, including the immersive show Wake The Tiger.

  • Planning early was key. We scoured car boot sales across the country to find the best bits and used our dressing rooms, and the studio of our wonderful Prop Supervisor Jamie Owen as a storage and refurb space.
  • We planned ahead and even hoovered up the black foam crumb used to create ‘ash’ into our reusable hoover bags and used this to create full sandbags for our next show – Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo.
  • 72% of our costumes were hired, rather than bought or made.
  • We made scenery using our existing stock flattage and vac-formed fake brickwork. Minimal items were bought new.

We are pleased to have made Theatre Green Book’s Basic Standard. We came very close to meeting the criteria for the Advanced Standard

Challenges

Sourcing secondhand carpet was sadly not possible in the design we required – however we managed to find a second life for this and hope it has many more to come.

  • Some items did go into general waste at the end of the day. However we kept these to a minimum and they were all well used and had a wonderful life before us.
  • We did need to buy rigging accessories to hang the furniture, however this has all gone back into our stock for use on future shows and was a worthy investment.