16-year-old Klara reviews Kyoto, a play that will get you uncomfortably warm
On 21 January this year, the day after the presidential inauguration, American president Donald Trump did what everyone expected him to do. He signed an executive order for the US – the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases – to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Agreement, the legally binding international agreement on climate change that aims to limit the rise of temperatures to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
The Paris agreement was the second of its kind. The first was signed almost two decades earlier in Kyoto, Japan – and is the centre of the action of the play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) that has just opened at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York, following a very well-received run in the UK.
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Kyoto mixes dark comedy with a political negotiation thriller, capturing the emotions of those involved in the decade-long diplomatic effort leading to the adoption of the Kyoto Agreement on 11 December 1997. It’s written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson and both the London and US versions are directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin.
As a young person, born 10 years, 10 months and 24 days after delegates in Japan finally agreed on the text of what became known as the Kyoto Protocol, I quickly realised that the show I was watching in London was not a thing of the past – at all.
Just one example: in the early 1990s, the delegate from Kiribati (played masterfully in London by Andrea Gatchalian; Taiana Tully takes the role in New York) made an emotional case for a coalition of island countries, as they understood that global warming would result in rising sea levels and cause their islands to submerge.
I realised I knew her argument by heart, because it is being repeated still: the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, in a op-ed from 2024, argued: “The Maldives is liable for just 0.003% of global emissions, but is one of the first countries to endure the existential consequences of the climate crisis.” Decades apart, the same argument is repeated almost word for word.
The creative team behind Kyoto draws the audience into the plot, which further reduced the feeling that the story is antiquated. The stage itself was a round table – which mainly represented UN conference rooms, but was also flexibly transformed into a Brazilian jungle, a temple in Japan or one of many hotel rooms that the play’s anti-hero, oil lobbyist and lawyer Don Pearlman, and his wife inhabited while attending one conference after another.
The theatre seats are arranged around the table (I certainly hope this is the case in the New York production too) and I enjoyed this connection between the play and the audience. We became part of the conference, and during the interval we got called back with the message that “all delegates should return to their seats as the committee sessions are about to begin.”
The climate crisis, which has terrified both individuals and nations for decades, is still here and is evolving in record time.
This year, NASA released a report stating that “2024 is the warmest year on record”. No matter how much we try to ignore it, this is only going to get worse.
Seeing Kyoto made me realise that the lack of meaningful political agreement on how to tackle the climate crisis is a defining feature of the last 30 years. Today, there are still people who don’t believe in what is happening, who are signing documents preventing their country from saving future generations.
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