CivicLAB in partnership with Derby Learning Theatre, University of Derby will host a panel event that uses Little Shop of Horrors as a provocative starting point for exploring the fraught relationship between industry and nature within contemporary civic and cultural contexts.
Bringing together voices from across practice, academia, and the arts, the panel will examine how the musical’s narrative of an unruly, ever‑expanding plant mirrors real‑world tensions between industrial ambition and the natural world’s capacity to push back. In the show, a seemingly miraculous botanical “innovation” quickly becomes a symbol of unchecked industrial appetite—revealing how growth, profit, and efficiency can spiral into exploitation and collapse.
The discussion will delve into how economic systems treat nature as a limitless resource, and how this industrial logic drives extraction, dependency, and degradation. By looking at the musical’s central plant as a metaphor for industrial expansion—hungry, insatiable, and demanding—the panel will consider what happens when human systems prioritise productivity over ecological balance, and convenience over reciprocity.
Connecting the story to urgent real-world issues, the panel will explore environmental degradation, climate change, and resource extraction, interrogating how industries attempt to dominate or optimise natural systems, often with irreversible consequences. Themes of corporate greed, misinformation, and the pressure to constantly “scale up” will be examined alongside the natural world’s resilience, agency, and refusal to remain passive.
Grounded in both theatrical storytelling and the realities of environmental crisis, the event will invite audiences to rethink long-held assumptions about industrial progress, mastery over nature, and the uneasy power struggle between human ambition and the living systems that sustain us.
Panellists include:
- TBC
FREE to attend and open to everyone
