Would you pay to watch a dramatisation of a series of summits, during which world leaders argue about carbon emissions? I extend my sympathies (and respect) to this play’s marketing department. Fortunately, the creative minds behind Kyoto know how to captivate an audience.
Travelling back to the 1980s and 1990s, Kyoto charts the path to the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark 1997 international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The treaty set binding reduction targets for industrialised countries and was eventually superseded by the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The action mostly takes place around a circular negotiating table, with side-room mini-meetings, as countries wrestle over commitments and wording.
American lawyer Don Pearlman (who was a real person) is our passport into this thicket of warring figureheads. He is head-hunted by a shadowy collective of fossil fuel lobbyists (the “Seven Sisters“) in matching dark overcoats, who require his talent for demolishing opposing arguments. Their mission? To obstruct climate action by any means necessary.
Pearlman establishes himself as the spokesperson for the Global Climate Coalition, a powerful industry lobby, formed by the US National Association of Manufacturers. An obedient capitalist, Pearlman methodically dismantles climate science, stalls negotiations, and fuels division. His transformation from indifferent lawyer to fierce climate sceptic is maddening.
During the interval, I had to remind myself that this is a play about pollution negotiations, because it is riveting. Primarily, the cast is clearly having a blast, energised by the script’s breakneck pace. The years sprint past. Even the agonising pedantry over commas and phrasing in draft agreements – so often the death knell of diplomatic momentum – becomes electrifying. Excerpts of negotiation texts are projected in red above the stage, only to be slashed, rewritten and diluted. Voices rise to a cacophony as the characters debate, each fighting to assert their nation’s interests, building to a furious crescendo of clattering nonsense.
Humanity in the trenches
Written by British playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the duo behind the Good Chance theatre in the Calais refugee camp, Kyoto finds the human stakes in a complex geopolitical story. Good Chance, known for its work with displaced artists, collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company to bring this play to life, first in Stratford-upon-Avon, and now for a 16-week run in London.
In their creative journey from Calais to Kyoto, the playwrights subtly connect climate change to displacement, without patronising or lecturing their audience. Instead, they stage negotiations as they were: tense, messy and driven by individuals with starkly different motivations.
While audiences might imagine the all-nighters, the obsession with minutae and the tedium of UN climate negotiations, experiencing them on stage is an entirely different matter. To watch a representative of the small island state of Kiribati in Micronesia (one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations) go toe-to-toe with the globe’s biggest polluters, is very different from reading about it in the news. Forget statistics and targets – here, we see real human beings, demanding the right to exist. It’s difficult to dismiss a crisis when its consequences stand before you, personified.
Great theatre elevates real-life drama, making the abstract visceral. Kyoto replaces the grey of politics with the splatter of colours that every person and nation actually is. There is humour and desolation, hope and betrayal. It reminds us that at the heart of every policy debate are people.
Ultimately, the Kyoto Protocol was diluted, its potential to bring about profound change buried alive under an avalanche of compromise. Now, in 2025, we watch the Paris Agreement teeter on the edge of irrelevance.
Through Don Pearlman, Kyoto tells the story of how a person can become so fixated on winning an argument that they will carry it to its illogical extreme – even at the cost of their own grandchildren’s future. This is not just a historical drama; it’s the uncomfortable story of how we got where we are today.
Facing the truth
What place does theatre like this have in our present moment? What can art do about atmospheric CO2 levels, aside from spew out more? And does it even matter, when the art in question is presented on a stage in London’s West End, one of the most exclusive entertainment districts on Earth? I don’t have answers for these questions.
But as novelist and poet Ben Okri put it in 2021: “Of the things that trouble me most, the human inability to imagine its end ranks very high … how else can one explain the refusal of ordinary, good-hearted citizens to face the realities of climate change? If we don’t face them, we won’t change them. And if we don’t change them, we will not put things in motion that would prevent them.”
The play closes not with a curtain coming down, but a shower of Japanese cherry blossoms – sakura. The ambassador for Japan tells the assembly that Kyoto’s sakura season is arriving earlier each year. But that was in 1997. Here we sit in 2025 and CO2 emissions continue to grow. The final blossom falls. The house lights come up. We remain in our seats, face-to-face with the climate crisis.
This is what art must do.
Kyoto is playing at Soho Place theatre in London until 3 May 2025.
