KYOTO

Kyoto takes a decade of climate conferences and gives you a chilling, funny and even poignant account of international negotiations on the climate climaxing in 1997 at the third COP. In what could be a heavily informational play, its stroke of genius is presenting the story through a villainous narrator - an American lawyer and ex-government strategist working for the “seven sisters” major oil companies.

What sane playwright tackles the minutes of a UN 1995 climate conference? Yet Kyoto proves that sanity is overrated when theatrical dynamite is the result. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, fresh from the necessary grit of The Jungle, have bypassed predictable piety and aimed straight for the jugular. Their masterstroke: ditching the earnest eco-warriors to unleash the devil himself – Don Pearlman, oil lobbyist extraordinaire, a creature of terrifying influence brilliantly summoned from the historical fog.

Stephen Kunken offers a finely judged performance as Pearlman. Introduced around the time of George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, this former Reagan administration lawyer finds his plans for an extended sabbatical with his wife, Shirley (Jenna Augen), interrupted by emissaries from the major oil conglomerates – the so-called ‘Seven Sisters’. Their warning of an impending environmentalist challenge to their industry initially meets Pearlman’s scepticism. Yet, his attendance at the soporific climate conferences of the late 1980s convinces him of the threat’s reality, and crucially, of his own capacity to counteract it.

The play lifts the lid off the squalid process of global agreement, revealing the grubby compromises beneath the polished rhetoric. If the style owes a debt to James Graham’s recently popular histories, it pays it back with interest, crackling with its own urgent energy. Does Pearlman occasionally seem less a man than a snarling embodiment of obstruction and oil greed? Perhaps. Is the final sentimental glance at his domestic life a bit of a clichéd misstep? Almost certainly – but it’s a rare failure of nerve in a play that otherwise stares unflinchingly at the mechanisms of power. Wordy but worth it if conferences are your thing.