On screen, saving the world often involves eye-popping effects and thrilling battles between arch-villains and lone heroes. In real life, it can be — literally — more prosaic.
One lengthy section of Kyoto, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new play about the groundbreaking 1997 UN climate conference in Kyoto, depicts delegates wrangling over the precise placement of a comma — the sort of micro-detail that can make or break a global deal, but scarcely pulse-quickening drama.
Yet writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson managed to turn that mind-numbing process into an electrifying piece of theatre, earning rave reviews when the show opened in Stratford-upon-Avon last summer. Now it has arrived in London’s West End in a production directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin.
Driving the play is the incongruous fact that the future of the planet lay in the hands of a group of sleep-starved delegates grappling with grammar and battling against the clock to secure agreement. The Kyoto protocol was historic (though the US never ratified it and later pulled out). It paved the way for all climate talks since and remains a landmark moment. But agreement was only reached many hours after the conference should have finished — the interpreters had left, exhausted delegates snatched naps on the plenary room floor and, at one point, negotiators nearly adopted a paragraph without a verb in it.
“The Japanese president of the conference resigned at 4am because he had to go back to Tokyo for a confidence vote,” says Robertson, when I meet the two playwrights backstage at London’s Soho Place Theatre. “Suddenly there were no translators, no president, the whole thing was a farce. You couldn’t get a coffee and no one’s slept in three days. And then in the middle of the night the conference staff started clearing up. [The delegates] said, ‘You can’t clear up, we’ve got hours to go,’ and they were like, ‘No, no, there’s another event booked here.’”
Out of such unglamorous conditions, a pioneering agreement was forged. It’s that contrast that Murphy and Robertson find so moving. “Everyone we spoke to who was there — negotiators, diplomats, scientists — it seemed like this was the most important moment of their lives,” says Robertson.
It’s a play about climate change, then, but it’s also, critically, about the difficult art of compromise. Murphy and Robertson wanted a drama that championed agreement and celebrated the sort of painstaking negotiation that has driven nearly every historic treaty. Heading into 2025, with the world so fractured, that emphasis feels even more important, says Murphy.
“The society we’re living in seems to have become obsessed with disagreement,” he says. “The idea of not wanting to compromise on your own point of view about anything: that taking a step towards something you disagree with is actually a threat to your identity.”
Murphy and Robertson know a fair bit about compromise. The two write together and have done since they first met at Oxford university 15 years ago. “We were the northern Joes,” says Murphy, grinning. “I’m from Leeds, he’s from Hull.”
In 2015 they founded Good Chance theatre company, which works with displaced artists to create drama such as The Jungle, an award-winning piece about the makeshift refugee settlement near Calais (demolished in 2016). That show, like Kyoto, was written jointly. Frequently, they work with one writer at the laptop and the other walking around speaking. “Every line is a negotiation,” observes Robertson, drily.
They both laugh. The pair make a great double act: they’re sparky, open and welcoming, with a habit of picking up on one another’s thoughts. It’s easy to see why a treaty that depended so profoundly on collaboration and precise wording appealed to them as a subject.
But there was still the challenge of turning gnarly arguments about grammar into riveting drama. Key to that was their choice of lead character: Donald Pearlman, a wily US lawyer and lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, dubbed “the high priest of the carbon club”. In Kyoto, Pearlman, played by Stephen Kunken, not only tries to block progress at every turn; he is also the narrator and guide to events. “You can’t have it all your own way,” he tells the audience, sardonically, in his opening speech.
Pearlman died in 2005, but Murphy and Robertson spent hours talking to his family about him and his motives, determined to make him far more than a cartoon villain.
“One thing I feel from talking to his family was the importance that America held for him as an idea,” says Murphy. “Don was the son of refugees who fled Europe and he believed, rightly or wrongly, that the world was better for America being clearly and solely at its head in a unipolar world. Part of the play, for me, has become setting that vision of a unipolar world against the multipolar reality that the world seems to be coming into.
“The challenge of that character is: can we, collectively as an audience, take a step towards somebody who we don’t like and who we disagree with? And treat that not just as intellectual challenge but an empathetic one? Because those are necessary components for reaching agreement and that’s what we have to do. It’s a good muscle to exercise at the moment.”
“[His story] became a brilliant symbol of America for us,” adds Robertson. “Because in this period the cold war has just ended and there is no challenge ideologically or intellectually. And then this thing happens [climate change] which seems to challenge the very idea of individual American freedom and suddenly all these smaller countries, the developing world, start to rise up. [Pearlman] feels the growing pains of giving up that hegemony — realising that they can’t dictate everything any more. He’s a good way of showing America going through that process.”
You could see Kyoto (co-produced by Good Chance and the RSC) as both a contemporary response to Shakespeare’s history plays and an urgent drama about a vital issue. Murphy and Robertson hope it will be the first of a “carbon cycle” trilogy. But does such a positive story depict false hope, given current despair over slow progress and rising temperatures, and deep concerns about Donald Trump’s vehement rejections of climate change?
The two Joes point out that the story isn’t over: “It’s not a static reality that we live in,” says Murphy. “Which is part of the difficulty of it all, but also, conversely, part of the hope of it.”
For them the show offers a chance to experience the euphoria of hope. Robertson suggests that we need to “rehearse” that feeling to believe in it and act on it.
“I view it as a bit of a fable,” he says. “There was a moment when the world agreed unanimously. That feels so far away right now. But if we get totally depressed nothing’s going to happen. And that’s why getting away from culture wars and talking in terms of moving forward together is useful. It’s the politics of small steps.
“So we want the audience to experience what that agreement must have felt like. If we can get them to feel like those people we spoke to — that near-to-tears feeling of utter pride and exhaustion — then walking out with that could be really powerful. I’m not ashamed to be hopeful.”
To May 3, sohoplace.org
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