Director: Ryan McVeigh

Venue: Young Vic Theatre

"Pastoral" by Thomas Eccleshare (2013) is a play set in a dystopian near future. A giant wood begins to grow in London and the nature invades houses, cars, supermarkets and streets. Characters start to accept their fate as the wood keeps growing and manifesting its tremendous power.

When first reading this play I was very interested in how it was able to touch important and delicate themes like nature and climate change in such a natural and humoristic frame.

The apartment in which the play initially takes place is exaggerated in its length. The proportions are similar to those of a cinema screen. The predominant material is the concrete of the surrounding walls which visibly present cracks and natural elements that emerge. The light coming from "outside", from the city, is an alien light that indicates that something anomalous is taking place outside Moll's apartment.

A design choice was to let all the "living" elements be characterized by colors, while the "constructed" elements varied over a range of grey. For this reason each character has their own color code and bright colors palette.

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