Kyoto
Kyoto, by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, is so indecently entertaining it almost feels like the result of a bet to choose the dullest, worthiest subject imaginable and make it as fun as humanly possible.
The duo’s second play together – following 2017’s The Jungle – is about the Kyoto UN climate change conference of 1997, at which every country on the planet eventually agreed to curb its greenhouse emissions.
It doesn’t make you a climate-change skeptic to think that sounds boring. But the secret is that Kyoto is actually a play about a total bastard.
Don Pearlman was a real oil lobbyist whose finger prints were all over climate conferences in the ‘90s. Rather brilliantly, Murphy and Robertson have made him their protagonist: it’s not a worthy play about well-meaning people trying to stop climate change; it’s about one man and a shady oil cartel’s efforts to make sure nobody does anything about it.
US actor Stephen Kunken is terrific as Pearlman, who we first meet in a scene set at George HW Bush’s inauguration. A junior official for the Reagan administration, lawyer Pearlman has vague plans to go on an extended break with his long-suffering wife Shirley (Jenna Augen), but is instead approached by a shady cabal of black-robed oil executives representing the so-called Seven Sisters, who warn him that an environmental pushback against Big Oil is brewing. Skeptical at first, Pearlman attends some sleepy late ’80s climate conferences and concludes the Sisters are right, and...
