Kyoto at @sohoplace review: this bravura show turns real life climate change talks into a gripping thriller
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Astonishingly, writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson have fashioned a taut and gripping thriller from 10 years of international climate change negotiations that resulted in the symbolically huge but eventually neutered 1997 Kyoto protocol. Their play gets a bravura, showmanlike production from directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin for the Royal Shakespeare Company – a troupe that’s alive to big themes, betrayals and manipulations, and the slipperiness of language, which is important here.
A strong ensemble showcases a seductively charismatic central performance from Stephen Kunken, recognisable from Billions, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many more. Here, he’s lawyer Don Pearlman, a strutting stork of a man funded by Big Oil and driven by American exceptionalism to thwart, undermine or derail any consensus on limiting carbon emissions.
He’s charming, amoral, devilishly persuasive, but we’re all villains here. Miriam Beuther’s set is a circular conference table-turned-stage, that turns the audience ringing it on all sides into complicit delegates. As Pearlman says, anyone who has driven a car or turned on a light has paid his wages.
Though the tendrils of activism, denialism and disinformation stretch back and forward in time, we begin in 1989, with the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the birth pangs of the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The meetings of the latter, where nations wrangled for days over single sentences and words in a declaration of shared intent, develop into the COP (Council of Parties) summits.
