Yes, these times are truly awful

Let's make a play about it

Togo Igawa as the representative for Japan in Kyoto. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Well, the world is burning, America has done an Eric Cartman on the Paris climate pact and we’re all going to hell in a driverless car, so a theatre show about people working really hard to stop the global powers from agreeing to tackle environmental collapse seems… apt.

What I’ve seen

Kyoto, at sohoplace (a transfer from the RSC in Stratford) is so much more fun than I expected, while also being truly shocking.

Created by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson (‘the Joes’) - the team behind Good Chance Dome, a theatre they set up and ran for seven months in the Calais refugee camp - it tells the story of the years leading up to the Kyoto agreement (which set legally binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) and the remarkable work that some people did to try to stop it happening. Yep.

The genius of this telling is their choice of narrator - Don Pearlman, a Republican lawyer-turned-oil-lobbyist who had served in the energy department under Reagan; here, a highly intelligent, charismatic guy straight out of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, whose own zealotry and fierce commitment to the American ideal of ‘freedom’ stems from the safety it provided to his Lithuanian Jewish parents escaping the horrors of mid-20th century Europe.

We see him at the start of the play (his first line, addressed to the audience, is something like: “If nothing else we can all agree that the times you live in are fucking awful”), tempted away at George Bush’s inauguration from the holiday he’s been promising his wife Shirley for years by deeply sinister representatives of the shadowy Seven Sisters (AKA Big Oil). He then spends the next decade or so muscling his way into COP conferences to undermine the climate change agenda with increasingly dirty tricks.

Stephen Kunken (Billions) is just fantastic as Pearlman (who was described in the newspapers as “the high priest of the carbon club”). Engaging, energetic, great fun to watch, even as you begin to realise how genuinely awful what he’s doing actually is.

He’s on the wrong side of history, sure, but his arguments about the hypocrisy of flying around the world to save the planet and the inevitable destruction of economies have an uncomfortable ring of truth about them. Two things can, of course, be true at the same time - a wind farm can be a laudable attempt to harness a sustainable source of energy but it can also be constructed with parts made in China with underpaid, unregulated labour, for example. Nothing is simple.