Climate Change Is Must-See Theater in London. Meet the Playwrights Behind “Kyoto”
By Christine Spolar
The 1997 UN climate agreement in Japan has been turned into a play that explores the politics and personalities behind the first global deal to limit greenhouse gases.
Negotiations over the 1997 United Nations climate agreement might not seem the sort of stuff that could draw sold-out audiences to London’s West End. Think again. “Kyoto,” a play that dramatizes the first legally binding global pact to set emission targets is a hot ticket.
Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Good Chance Productions, “Kyoto” was conceived by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, young playwrights whose previous collaborations include “The Jungle,” an award-winning drama about a refugee encampment near the port of Calais, France. “Kyoto” premiered in 2024 in Stratford-Upon-Avon and opened in January in London at @sohoplace.
Murphy and Robertson recently chatted with Inside Climate News about their work. The talks leading to the Kyoto Protocol, they found, offered a way to explain the stakes of a warming planet and the convictions of the scientists, delegates and lawyers, including a wily American lobbyist named Donald Pearlman, who participated.
The playwrights have silkened the sticky jargon of U.N. reports into sometimes humorous, clear and often sobering dialogue. Audience members slip on lanyards—tagging themselves as if delegates—when they enter the theater-in-the-round, a hint that no one can be just an observer to climate change.
Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.
CHRISTINE SPOLAR: How did you decide climate change could be good theater?
JOE MURPHY: I think if we were setting out originally with that question, we might still be here. It’s a difficult subject, and it’s difficult for all its immense complexities. … But actually, the way that we came at it was from a sense of concern about political polarization.
In truth, we were worried about the seeming sort of growing obsession in our society with disagreement, and the sort of entrenched personal opinions that you could see on individual levels. You could see on national levels. You could see on international levels. A seeming unwillingness to enter a process of agreement about really, really important stuff. So we found ourselves asking the question-–why should that be the case?-–and also searching for stories that would really valorize the idea of agreement and the importance of agreement. You know, the process of agreement involves compromise almost by definition. Getting people attracted to that idea once again felt like a decent contribution to make.
JOE ROBERTSON: Then we discovered the story of Kyoto by accident. We were in the car listening to the radio, and heard a few of the people who were there, a few of the delegates, people from environmental engineering NGOs, talking about this amazing moment in history when the world unanimously agreed to legally binding emissions targets for the first and, actually, possibly last time.
We’d heard about the COPs happening every year [the U.N. meetings known as the Conference of the Parties that debate and assess progress in combating climate change] and that the world gets together and talks about these things. But we realized we didn’t know anything about them. We didn’t know what went on inside those U.N. corridors. We didn’t know the contours of the debate.
So we’d set about researching and emailed everyone we could find—from delegates to scientists to lawyers to world leaders—and embarked on this amazing series of conversations with people who shared their experiences and memories and wisdom about that time. We just were blown away by the emotion and the drama and the jeopardy and the pride with which they talked about these multilateral sort of gatherings. And their pride at what they achieved.
It just felt like this whole new lens to view the climate crisis. It was a human lens. And it was deeply, deeply personal. As playwrights we are always trying to make the political personal. We’re always trying to make these big, almost sort of intractable, difficult-to-describe things really relatable on a human level. That was when we went: OK, we got a play.
SPOLAR: The story hinges on how to define climate change. That’s a very wordy and perhaps worthy endeavor, but again, very wordy. Can you explain the process of using the language of the IPCC reports [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments that are notoriously dense] for this?
MURPHY: Well, at first glance it may not appear to be the most fruitful material for dramatic material, but actually, if you sort of scratch away at the surface, very quickly there’s a world of language that comes with the COPs and all its research, which is always interesting as a starting point.
But crucially, as dramatists, you’re looking for conflict. You’re looking for oppositions within the story. And given that we were writing, or trying to write, about both climate change and this notion of agreement, coming across the person who became our central character, Don Pearlman, was a really, really crucial moment in the process.
Because Don Pearlman exists in the play, in the world of the play, as an agent of disagreement.
And so suddenly we’d happened upon a character who, in a sense, did not want this play to happen. He certainly did not want it to reach the conclusion that the play eventually reaches—one of unanimous agreement. And so suddenly we had a play where we had a protagonist working in one direction and the rest of the play working in another. And that was a really exciting moment. At that point, we found ourselves in a very human situation.
You know, it’s difficult trying to get hold of a huge subject like climate change, which relates to and affects literally every single person in the world. How do you characterize it on an individual level? But we suddenly felt like we’d found something-–and that central conflict in the play illuminated the whole thing for us.
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