Kyoto turns climate talks into a political thriller
Nancy Crane in Kyoto. Photo by Manuel Harlan
Daniel Nelson
A play about an international climate conference in 1997, I hear you say. Sounds boring, you add.
But you are so, so wrong.
Kyoto is a rip-roaring, piledriver of a play.
It’s fast-moving, witty, dramatic, cynical, humane, informative - and surprisingly accurate.
Not accurate in the sense that every word and action is the verifiable truth. But as someone who has attended a score of United Nations conferences, including climate summits, I can testify that it gives a genuine flavour of the national self-interest, horse-trading, shifting alliances, and personal and political motives of participating countries, ambassadors and lobbyists.
One of the lobbyists, a US lawyer representing a group of major Western oil corporations, is a key character and the play’s master of ceremonies, ruthlessly deepening international divisions, whipping oil- and US-friendly countries into line, reminding the audience of their own complicity in petroleum-based life, including waving them off for interval drinks “sponsored by BP”.
Yes, of course, the complex events of a 10-day meeting are absurdly simplified into one theatrical evening; dramatic necessity has turned the mind-numbing monotony of UN negotiations into quick-fire shouting matches; and there’s some cheap-laugh national stereotyping. Also, the play is not really about global heating or how we tackle it: what it offers is an insight into UN negotiating procedures.
But the positives far outweigh the negatives: this is bravura theatre-making and most of the targets of mockery or criticism are spot on, such as the creation of “apolitical, non-commercial” NGOs as fronts for business interests. Two of the funniest targets are speeded-up exchanges over the use of square brackets around yet-to-be-agreed text in UN negotiations and over the placing of a comma.
The play is serious fun, as you would expect from writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, whose first play was The Jungle, based on their experience running a theatre in the Calais refugee camp. Kyoto shows — vividly, entertainingly — how irreconcilable interests were cajoled, bullied and squeezed into an agreement on legally binding carbon emission targets.
The question of whether the Kyoto Protocol was a historic landmark or has been rendered less significant by subsequent failures to curb global emissions will have to be tackled on another stage.
+ Kyoto, from £30, is @SohoPlace, 4 Soho Place, W1D 3BG until 3 May. Info: Kyoto