Kyoto: timely and enthralling play about first climate treaty reveals potent power of consensus
With California poised for more fires and a climate-change denying plutocrat back in the White House, the London opening of Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play Kyoto – dramatising the intense negotiation of the world’s first climate change treaty – could hardly be more pertinent.
Scaling up from the intimate Swan theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to the chrome chic of the West End’s Soho Place, the RSC’s show is exemplary in its immersiveness. As we enter, we’re given conference lanyards – NGO delegate for me – and the actors sit among us, hopping up to take their place on Miriam Buether’s ovoid stage.
It’s politics as glossy spectacle, but then so, increasingly, is the Cop (Conference of the Parties) process it presents to us. And the climate elite were in attendance: UK energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband two rows in front of me; co-leader of the Greens, Carla Denyer, peering from the circle.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
At the close, the audience rose to its feet to offer the same euphoric applause that greeted the signing of the eponymous Kyoto protocol in 1997. I left on a high; only when I got outside did I wonder what we were actually applauding.
The play’s producer Good Chance Theatre’s trump card is making its lens on climate diplomacy Don Pearlman, a former attorney for US president Ronald Reagan. We witness him fashioning the climate-sceptic, doubt-sowing “Climate Council”, and glove-puppeting Saudi interventions to stall mitigating action.
Played with rangy energy by Stephen Kunken, Pearlman is a charismatic compere, evoking from the beyond the grave the 1990s as a blissful era of consensus compared with our polarised present. Prowling closed conferences with gleeful America First nihilism, he’s a horribly likeable Mephistopheles.
Indeed, the play is a fine entertainment all round, given its complex source material, and leans into a genre – the closed-conference drama – which carries political presumptions. Think of Edward Berger’s hit film Conclave, adapted from Robert Harris’s novel; while there’s less swearing in Rome than Kyoto, the gathered international cardinals and their opaque voting procedures mirror Kyoto’s diplomats wrangling over the intricacies of climate science.
This genre offers set-piece debates, carpet-chewing parts, and an inbuilt sweaty tension reaching back to Reginald Rose’s deathless 1954 classic, 12 Angry Men. As in the subsequent examples, Rose’s jurors are sealed off from influence, locked in a room with only rhetoric and reason to hand.
In Sidney Lumet’s classic film version (1957), the naturalism of this is belied by Henry Fonda’s Christ-like protagonist: the all-American liberal in a white suit, undermining the certainties of his fellow angry men. As if in a sporting fixture, the action is punctured by voting – and ultimately, reason and light prevail over ignorance and prejudice.
Kyoto is less programmatic than this and more of a revue, with the actors furiously multi-rolling, and Pearlman subject to the whims of a mysterious chorus of black-clad Big Oil – boo!
Aping the broad vivacity of Enron and This House (a play about the 1974-79 Labour government’s battle for survival), it turns diplomacy into contact sport. As delegates rant about emission trading schemes and cap-and-trade mechanisms, the audience remains behind the curve.
The effect is satiric, with gales of laughter greeting the semantic quibbling, the open or closed brackets, the conditional or future tenses. Yet diplomacy can be life and death stuff, as we see in the painful back and forth of the belated “ceasefire” in Gaza. At times I missed the tragic weight beneath the sparring, more apparent in the conference plays of David Edgar – a master of the genre.
In plays like The Prisoner’s Dilemma or The Shape of the Table, Edgar makes dazzling procedural capital out of the painstaking work of peacebrokering. Words, commas, colons and brackets all means carbon reduced, borders redrawn and lives ultimately saved.
Kyoto celebrates the potent power of consensus through Pearlman’s indefatigable foe, Argentinian diplomat Raul Estrada. The moving climax of his gavel smashing the world’s first carbon reduction protocol into existence renders our anti-hero apparently irrelevant.
Like Conclave, the play becomes a celebration of politics itself, giving us a nostalgic sugar-rush of liberal avatars Angela Merkel or the late John Prescott at work – wonderfully impersonated by Kristin Atherton and Ferdy Roberts respectively.
Yet, after the applause died out and I stepped into a weirdly muggy January night, the drama’s consolations fell away. After all – pace Conclave – outside the Vatican, it’s the hard-right which holds the ring; and in the years to come, Pearlman’s denialist descendants will be calling the shots, not Estrada’s.
Are we addicted to tales of the benevolence of our political class, just as the “rules-based world order” founders? Are we hooked on 1990s nostalgia despite it being the era of the great acceleration, driving the current fires towards the hills of Hollywood? In short, are we looking back fondly because consensus politics is now firmly consigned to history?
One thing’s for sure: elite policymaking will face a tougher crowd than the one that greeted Kyoto on its opening night.
Steve Waters receives funding from the AHRC.