Kyoto at @sohoplace

Simon Jenner in the West End
17 January 2025

“The planet is burning.” Such words have long been clichés but, with the Los Angeles fires and President Trump promising a different kind of firestorm, this transfer of Kyoto is timely. A play of sprawling conferences on climate change might not seem dramatic – unlike say a single trial – but this is gripping, enraging, inspiring. Writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson wrote it in 2022–23 for their Good Chance Theatre in a co-production with the RSC. Premiered at Stratford last year, it transfers to @sohoplace directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin till 3 May.

Andrea Gatchalian as Kiribati.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

This is a play too about commas and climate, protocols and procrastination, filibusters and breakthroughs. The climax is about all these. Including on the way discovering the fossil companies knew before anyone else exactly when climate change would kick in, and buried their own reports. Amidst all those rich and disproportionately influential climate-deniers it’s a quite brilliant stroke to tell the early story of COP (Conference of the Parties) through one of their chief protagonists.

From early 1989 Wall Street lawyer Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), former Reagan advisor on the environment, turns lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. Dragging his retirement-seeking wife Shirley (perpetually laconic Jenna Augen) around the world, we see smaller conferences burgeon into national blocs like the G77. That’s when the predominantly Global South finds a single voice to oppose primarily the US’s complicity with that industry; and more naked Saudi Arabian self-interest. There’s a memorable series of “noes” from Raad Rawi as a dignified, but finally surprising “Saudi Arabia”. And that’s before you negotiate with emerging nations about how not to develop like the Global North did.

With Daldry and Martin helming a cast of 14 actors this feels exciting and intimate: relishing the three-sided configuration of this flexible theatre. It allows Miriam Buether’s raised circular stage to be surrounded with audience seats set lower down. Sightlines work well as actors playing mainly delegates sit just ahead of the audience. The latter are offered COP lanyards too, but don’t get to vote, unlike say James Graham’s Quiz.

Much of the colour emerges from Natalie Pryce’s vibrant costumes for several delegates. Akhila Krishnan’s bustling video design projects footage and graphics, night skies, and more magic than such projections normally manage. Aideen Malone’s lighting works cleverly with this: not easy in such an open configuration. Paul Englishby’s music meshes with Christopher Reid’s crowd noises.

Ferdy Roberts as the UK .
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Kunken virtually never leaves the stage. He’s winningly confiding and infuriating, thrillingly Machiavellian as he recruits help for denial, digs dirt, and latterly, when things unravel, proves affecting. He’s perpetually distracted cutting deals – and family – on the phone. His failure to connect with his children rubs up against Augen’s Shirley, his most powerful interlocutor, bar one. Pearlman had to fight his way to acceptance. He hasn’t stopped. His only true ally, as he discovers, is Fred Singer (Duncan Wisbey), a barrelling US scientist opposing climate change.

The action moves from 1989 to 1997. Pearlman actually references “scorched earth” in his attempts to baffle climate change agreement. As he says to his friendly sparring partner Argentinian lawyer-turned-diplomat Raúl Estrada-Oyuela (Jorge Bosch), who chairs the summits: “This is not negotiation, it’s hand-to-hand combat.” Bosch produces one of the warmest performances: twinkling, witty, and confiding, Raúl, as he’s known, does his best to win Pearlman over. To no avail. That’s after leading an earlier conference into a magical Argentinian forest to see Werner Herzog direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its climate-change speech of Oberon’s given to Bottom. One of those visually indelible moments that stud Kyoto.

Another at the end is set up by a dignified speech earlier by the host, Japan (Togo Igawa), who talks of 72 seasons, and several times embodies affronted dignity, as he points out the cherry blossom is skewed earlier and earlier. It’s motifs like this that show off Kyoto at its most poetic. Japan’s foil is China (Kwong Loke) and you can see how Loke literally embodies the flexing of its new world power as he vows China will not be pushed aside. Five months after Hong Kong has reverted to Chinese rule, Loke’s speech shows the moment the axis of power shifts.

Comparable with Bosch is Ferdy Roberts, playing two parts: with sinister aplomb as MI5-ish Houghton, and with warmth, truculence, and a passionate address to Bosch as Prescott (or UK). Prescott proves a lynchpin promoting “the politics of exhaustion” as he advocates wearing the opposition down. Roberts’ set-piece on how Prescott manages this in 1960 is also a homage to a much-missed man (who penned one of the prefaces as his last act before he died) from the two playwrights’ home cities, Leeds and Hull.

Other yea-sayers include one casualty of hand-to-hand combat or defamation at Pearlman’s hands, Ted Santer (a watchful, mordant Dale Rapley). Santer’s a derided climate scientist who loses his job and Nobel nomination, and becomes the Pearlmans’ stalker, photographing them everywhere. Shirley even engages with him and seeds of doubt are sown before she realizes. Elsewhere Rapley surprises as an Al Gore who at this point is intent on delay and equivocation.

Jungle, the playwrights’ last work about the Calais refugees, dips into detail and sweeps on. That’s what Kyoto manages superbly; and why each of the 14 cast are generously spot-lit as a moment swoops on them. They can turn swooper instead. A younger Angela Merkel (Kristin Atherton) crisps the air with authority and turning points early on. A ferocious intervention by the delegate for the island nation of Kiribati (Andrea Gatchalian), also predominantly early, proves pivotal. She’s the mind behind the G77 bloc: “We will not drown in silence” as Nancy Crane’s “US” and others wonder what the drowning of a few thousand is compared to the world’s prosperity. Tanzania (Aïcha Kossoko) rises as if to stop a tank with stinging one-liners. There’s comedy too as Secretariat (Oliva Barrowclough) struggles to keep pace with events and improvises fast.

But through the first half’s Pearlman-fuelled narrative there’s a magnificent sense that he is fighting against odds, despite encouraging inertia to gain its own momentum. The climactic deadlocked summit has only hours to go before Estrada-Oyuela erupts in a desperate process that’s as absorbing as it seems comic. The adrenalin of dialogue turns into a pinball machine of single words bouncing off delegates. And the effect exhilarates as you imagine exhaustion being punched through – in split percentages. It’s an extraordinary ensemble performance too: each character’s etched and believable, each lent their own agency.

Shirley, always more prone to accept climate change, finally steps centre-stage, reminding us lionesses live twice as long as lions, and finding bleak consolation. Here too, the energy fines down into an epilogue blessed quizzically in a last coup. Outstanding.