Kyoto at @sohoplace review: this bravura show turns real life climate change talks into a gripping thriller

Astonishingly, writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson have fashioned a taut and gripping thriller from 10 years of international climate change negotiations that resulted in the symbolically huge but eventually neutered 1997 Kyoto protocol. Their play gets a bravura, showmanlike production from directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin for the Royal Shakespeare Company – a troupe that’s alive to big themes, betrayals and manipulations, and the slipperiness of language, which is important here.

A strong ensemble showcases a seductively charismatic central performance from Stephen Kunken, recognisable from Billions, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many more. Here, he’s lawyer Don Pearlman, a strutting stork of a man funded by Big Oil and driven by American exceptionalism to thwart, undermine or derail any consensus on limiting carbon emissions.

He’s charming, amoral, devilishly persuasive, but we’re all villains here. Miriam Beuther’s set is a circular conference table-turned-stage, that turns the audience ringing it on all sides into complicit delegates. As Pearlman says, anyone who has driven a car or turned on a light has paid his wages.

Though the tendrils of activism, denialism and disinformation stretch back and forward in time, we begin in 1989, with the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the birth pangs of the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The meetings of the latter, where nations wrangled for days over single sentences and words in a declaration of shared intent, develop into the COP (Council of Parties) summits.

I know. It’s boggling. Don’t worry. At least half of it went over my head. But the two Joes (who set up the Good Chance Theatre in a Calais refugee camp in 2015 then created a stunning play about it, The Jungle, in London in 2017) adroitly distill characters, finesse ideas and crunch data. This, along with the polish of Daldry and Martin’s production, can give the play a facile sheen.

Most of the actors play generic representations of their nation or bloc. “Tanzania” (Aïcha Kossoko) represents Africa; Raad Rawi’s “Saudi Arabia” embodies all the Arab petro-states; Togo Igawa’s “Japan” is a collage of national stereotypes embracing kimonos, cherry blossoms, and honour.

Jorge Bosch gets a bit more character to play with as Argentinian delegate Raul, whose charm hides a devastating effectiveness, and Nancy Crane is amusingly sweary as the American envoy. The double-act of Angela Merkel and John Prescott at the Kyoto summit gets easy laughs.

Pearlman’s corruption is underlined by the fact he’s an indifferent husband, a bad dad and a compulsive smoker. The tobacco industry wrote the playbook (deny, discredit, sabotage, then pivot) the oil industry followed. Guess what kills Pearlman? Hint, it’s not a car.

I don’t mean to sound snippy. One can see the two Joes’ workings but that doesn’t make this play any less impressive. It has an urgent propulsive thrust and is genuinely daring: a polyglot argument about punctuation is far, far funnier than it should be.

Climate change is so existentially threatening and politically charged it’s tempting to just look away. A sleek, smart play that lays out issues that were obvious in 1997 – and 1988 and 1959 – is welcome.

@sohoplace, to May 3; book tickets here.