The RSC and Good Chance production runs at @sohoplace until 3 May
A play about protocols, punctuation, politics and procedure doesn’t sound like the stuff of dream drama. Yet Kyoto, about the behind-the-scenes battles to create the first global agreement on combating dangerous climate change, is a work of Shakespearean sweep and ambition, an invigorating and challenging piece of political theatre.
The events it depicts took place between 1989 and 1997, the period when scientists first warned of the dangers of man-made greenhouse gas emissions causing accelerating climate change, and when a group of fossil fuel lobbyists dedicated themselves to stopping international treaties that would commit to targets and timetables to cut these emissions.
Writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson began writing the piece for their Good Chance Theatre in a co-production with the RSC in 2022. Watching it today – as Los Angeles burns and President Trump hoves into view, backed by climate change-denying billionaires – feels like being immersed in a vital and essential draft of history. It tells us how we got to where we are.
The genius of the play is that its central figure is not a scientist or a campaigner or a UN diplomat, but the Wall Street lawyer Don Pearlman who became an influential lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. He adopts a scorched earth policy in his efforts to discredit climate change science and derail the UN’s attempts to make COP diplomacy meaningful. “This is not negotiation, it’s hand-to-hand combat.”
He is the devil in the view of most of the audience, in the pay of the sinister “Seven Sisters” of the oil companies, yet like many villains he has some of the best lines, reminding a sceptical audience that oil may be a threat to the life of the planet, but it is also the stuff which enables the manufacture of everything. “It is the water, the wine, the blood. It is the American sacrament,” he says, before later cheekily sending us out for interval drinks “sponsored by BP.”
In Stephen Kunken’s wiry, energetic performance, he is also extremely funny, even while he is outlining his strategies to derail attempts at compromise. In fact, the entire play, for all its seriousness, is engagingly witty – there is one brilliant scene that is entirely about punctuation changes – and the heft and humour of its script enables everyone to lean in, feeling they understand what is going on and are fully engaged with the debate unfolding.
Miriam Buether’s set – a round conference table at which some audience members are delegates – encourages this sense of involvement. So does the direction of Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, which has a constant sense of movement and a rising mood of desperation as the amiable Raúl Estrada-Oyela (played with lightness and passion by Jorge Bosch) cajoles, bullies and finally drives the delegates and the negotiations over the line.
As in their previous epic The Jungle, about migrants at the Calais refugee camp, Murphy and Robertson have an eye both for detail and for sweep. They rest in moments such as the arrival of a young Angela Merkel (Kristin Atherton) determined to make her mark, or the emotional intervention of the delegate for the island nation of Kiribati (Andrea Gatchalian). “We will not drown in silence.”
But they also keep the action brilliantly propulsive, with delegates rushing to and fro, setting obstacles to agreement, constantly on the phone to their political masters. The cast all play multiple parts with lived-in realism. It’s a wonderful ensemble.
The play text opens with a quote from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” That’s exactly what Kyoto does. It takes recent events of vital importance to the world and makes them into a play that genuinely increases understanding. In a time of disagreement, it asserts the power of coming together. It nudges the world a little. It’s a fantastic achievement.