Enthusiastically reviewed by my Midlands colleague Colin Davidson when it opened last year in the Swan Theatre, Stephen and Justin Martin’s production of Kyoto is now a London must see, fitting perfectly into @sohoplace’s auditorium.
The 1997 COP 3, the third Conference of Parties held in Kyoto as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, may seem an unlikely subject for a play, but in fact it provides gripping drama.
It may have happened nearly three decades ago, you may know the outcome and be aware of what has happened since, but the battle that led up to the eventual adoption of the Kyoto Protocol makes good theatre.
Writers Murphy and Robertson don’t centre on environmentalist heroes; their narrator is Don Pearlman, the lawyer and political lobbyist engaged by the “Seven Sisters” (as a group of major oil companies has been labelled) to protect their interests. There is an ominous image when he is seen backed by their black-coated representatives, but Stephen Kunken doesn’t make him a monster, and this devil’s-advocate approach underlines the way commercial interests undermine progress.
The lead up to Kyoto is traced through earlier international conferences, with a glance right back to 1957, when scientists first warned the oil industry of the effect of their emissions on climate. The argument and conflict of conference is then brilliantly captured as a chaos precisely presented, embracing hours spent debating a single word in a sentence or a point of punctuation, but delivered at speed with video images adding explanation and emphasis.
Designer Miriam Buether’s circular setting, with the conference table becoming a stage, makes the audience delegates (with lanyards national IDs offered as they enter) or at least made observers but intercut with more private exchanges, including exchanges between Pearlman and his wife Shirley (Jenna Augen).
Delegates are sometimes identified simply by nationality, but the same actor may also become a specific individual, such as Ferdy Roberts’s John Prescott and Kristin Atherton’s Angela Merkel. Andrea Gatchalian, as island Kiribati, pleads on behalf of those threatened with drowning as ocean levels increase, Aïcha Kossoko is Tanzania, speaking for Africa and the developing world, Kwong Loke is China, Raad Rowi is Saudi Arabia and Nancy Crane’s USA is noticeable in her red outfit and for her swearing.
The intensity of it all could become wearing were it not lightened by humour. Jorge Bosch’s colourful and deftly physical Argentinian delegate Raul Estrada Oyuela brings especial joy, and there are some lovely images as when Togo Igawa’s Japan welcomes delegates in a shower of cherry blossom petals.
Though packed with individual performances that make their mark, this is essentially an ensemble piece, presenting precisely timed and beautifully orchestrated chaos that also goes behind the scenes. It has largely the same cast as in the Swan last year but is apparently shorter—though whether that is a faster pace or clever cuts I couldn’t say.
Kyoto generates an excitement that seems positive, its convoluted exchanges over a particular wording raise a smile though they must have been despairing, but it is a picture of political bargaining, not a triumph of scientific sense and enlightenment, and look at what has happened since. Progress since COP 3 has been disappointing. At a time when a new President is moving into the White House, it is a reminder of what influences international diplomacy.