March 30, 2025

Scorched Earth: On Kyoto

An essay about the Royal Shakespeare Company and Good Chance Theatre's production of Kyoto (2025).

Kia ora koutou katoa and welcome back to Post-Electric, a newsletter about theatre and culture in the age of the profit-driven blackout.

The other week, a friend said to me that they were worried my emails were getting caught by a spam filter, because they hadn’t received one in about a year. It was funny, and they were being sincere, which made it really funny, because it was much a nicer explanation than ‘I haven’t written anything in a year because I was scared’.

Because that’s basically it - I got freaked out by writing publicly after a four year hiatus and I tried to hold myself to deadlines without giving myself the time to write or think. I sowed the seeds of anxiety and grew a little garden around the newsletter.

But I still want to write about the things I’m seeing and share them with people who want to read, and the thing my friend said was the drop of water that broke the dam. So here’s an essay I’ve been sitting on and tinkering with for a month and a half, about the Royal Shakespeare Company and Good Chance Theatre’s West End production of Kyoto.

Scorched Earth: On Kyoto

Don Pearlman, Kyoto’s nominal protagonist, introduces himself at the top of the play as an employee to, nay, disciple of, America’s ‘last great President’, Ronald Reagan. Sure, it’s not a given that Kyoto’s audience is anti-Reagan - despite all the stereotypes, the right do love the theatre - but I know that I have certain opinions about the political career of the star of 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo, and I can hazard that you, the reader, probably share those opinions.

To you and I, then, Don’s introduction is an invitation to bargain, to find common ground with someone you disagree with. Don makes it easy, initially, charming and energised - Stephen Kunken, alumnus of Lucy Prebble’s ENRON and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, flips between diegetic scenes and direct address like we’re a confidant on his journey into climate change. We’re here for the ride-along, and Don’s the driver, and you can trust him behind the wheel. Even if you disagree with him, you can trust him. After all, this is the last great age of civil disagreement - and dignified compromise.

Kyoto (2025, Good Chance Theatre) is a blistering pinball machine through history, writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson sprinting us through the arduous seven year process that led to the unanimous adoption of the Kyoto Protocol at COP 3 in December 1997 - a rare, incredible moment of international consensus, where 193 nations agreed that climate change is real, that humanity is contributing to it, and action is needed. It’s well-timed: as the US withdraws from the Paris Agreement and the world’s biggest oil companies post record profits from fossil fuel extraction, casting our eyes back to Kyoto feels useful, in a grim kind of way.

Agree to Disagree

But if there’s anything that I’m really resonating with in Kyoto - and I’m resonating with a lot - it’s the way it explores the world of ‘civil disagreement’. We’re entering an unprecedented age of people believing that we used to live in a world where you could Hash It Out with people who disagreed with you, that politics was defined by cool heads, compromise and concession across the ideological spectrum. It’s the last gasp of Fukuyama’s End of History - Western liberal democracy may not have been the touchdown we thought it was, but we had it, and for a couple of decades we were able to go out to dinner, talk about different views and go home without causing a Tory to write a thinkpiece about how they can’t get a date.

Kyoto is full of people like this, lifer diplomats and civil servants who share opposing views but believe they can Still Be Friends. And their worldviews are illustrated in the play’s design and dramaturgy. Miriam Buether’s circular conference table stage invokes the Brecht-inspired work of British dramatists like David Hare and David Edgar, a feeling reinforced by the direct address, the forum theatre-style history-telling, the verfremdungs positively effekted. Watching the first seven minutes through the relay screen (long story, not my fault), I was reminded more than anything of the blown-out archival recording of Stuff Happens, Hare’s potted history of the Iraq War, that I saw back in 2019.

Putting Don in the driver’s seat is another great play, because Don is not here for civil disagreement. He threatens people’s careers and coaches the Saudi representative on how to ruin proceedings. He lies and cheats and stalks the stage like a predator. Importantly, he views the play’s frequent arguments about language, about what’s bracketed and what isn’t, what’s too conditional and what’s too certain, with a kind of malicious condescension. To delegates from nations like Kiribati, these words are important tools for accountability, precursors to targets and timelines for developed nations. To Don, they’re blue shells on Rainbow Road, a weapon he can use to prevent the do-gooders from ever getting ahead.

Don’s bad-faith autonomy extends to the play’s structure and style. In one moment, he rocks through a series of conferences with his own backing band, played by firebrand Austrian climate denier Fred Singer; in another, he tells the sound operator to turn off a track because it’s ‘too sad’. I agree with Natasha Tripney at Cafe Europa that Don’s control of the fourth wall feels underutilised, though; Murphy and Robertson leave a whole world of nasty editorial on the table.

Productive Friction

The moments of greatest triumph in Kyoto aren’t moments of dialogue or tough negotiation. Murphy and Robertson give us plenty of those moments, for sure, moments where everyone at the table ‘loses a little bit’ to get to something halfway decent. But the biggest gains are from useful friction, voices being heard that weren’t heard before. When the representative from Kiribati strides onto the conference table and announces that the low-lying islands of the G77 are splintering and forming their own voting bloc, AOSIS, the earthquake they create ends up giving them remarkable power to negotiate, demand and force compromise from hegemons who blithely call them ‘map stains’ behind their backs. 

These moments of bloody-minded resistance are the play’s most striking offers, demonstrating the importance of knowing when to force something through because you just absolutely fucking have to. Another example: rambunctious Argentinian diplomat Raul Estrada, introduced as a buffoon out of his depth (I’ll note that it’s not clear here whether this is Don’s editorial or Murphy and Robertson’s). By the third act, though, Raul’s chairing COP 3, and while he’s initially convinced that he’ll be able to create positive change through healthy discourse, he ultimately realises that the only way this Protocol will pass is by forcing people to ‘agree to lose’. So he makes a legendary Hail Mary play: he goes for a three hour nap while everyone’s bickering, then reconvenes the sleep-deprived negotiators for proceedings after the Assembly has officially concluded. It’s a bloody-minded spectacle of forced cooperation, LEDs around the stage flashing ‘CARRIED’ as Raul spends all of his political capital on a global framework for climate action. It’s thrilling, it’s brilliant, I love it.

Vitally, it’s also not a feel-good ending. Raul gets his protocol but is excommunicated from future COPs, attending only as a chauffeur. Nations across the world ratify the agreement, bringing it into force, but America refuses to join them. And Don continues his dark work, trashing and breaking on behalf of Big Oil, literally to his grave: at the end of the play, Don is carried off on a hospital bed, leaving behind his wife, Shirley, one of the play’s most curious characters.

On Shirley

Most of Kyoto’s characters are composites, representative of positions as much as they are people (not all of them, mind: the Global Majority negotiators are never named, but almost every single white negotiator is). China represents the emergent economies of the 90s, whose skyrocketing productivity scared the established powers; Tanzania represents nations seeking redress for centuries of Western colonialism; Saudi Arabia represents those OPEC nations that saw (and still see) climate action as an attempted imperial imposition on their ability to exploit their own natural resources. Only one character sits outside the process: Don’s wife, Shirley.

Shirley’s arc is superficially familiar: the doting wife who doesn’t ask questions, the nominally liberal spouse who worries that her husband is on the wrong side of history. But her anxiety never transforms into action. She’s wringing her hands until the end, keeping out of Don’s business, making the most of her jaunts to various exotic locales while he carries out the will of Big Oil across town. When Don falls ill - indeed, as he’s dying - Shirley takes on the burden of direct address and begins to lament, to us, a time when we could talk and disagree on politics in a civil way. We’ve lost the art of disagreement, she says. Wouldn’t it be better if we got back to it.

This plea could not ring more false than it does coming from Shirley, who barely challenges her own husband when he tells her he’s working to ‘preserve American freedom’. Jenna Augen’s performance here is remarkable, full of a light and bonhomie that’s covering for something: a deep disquiet that her husband isn’t in the right, that she’s complicit in that, and that her Golden Age of Disagreement never really existed in the first place. That she’s doing what everyone else does, moving to meet Don with no compromise in turn.

The Twist 

There are parts of Kyoto where I worry that it oversells the achievement of 1997. Robin McKie at The Guardian writes the same, providing a laundry list of examples that illustrate Kyoto as ‘a tea light flickering in the void’.

There are also parts where I worry it overstates the influence of people like Don, who, if this play is to be believed, was a Machiavelli who had Western powers and OPEC producers eating out of his hand, waiting for his phone call, parroting his lines into the room. Take the representative for Saudi Arabia, who’s presented for too much of the play as a malleable ball of clay, shaped to Don’s design. The third act twist, when Saudi decides to agree to the Protocol on its own terms, doesn’t do nearly enough to drive home that actually, Saudi might not just be a puppet of Big Oil. It may be capable of awful behaviour all on its own.

And there are moments where it feels like the play’s obvious sentimentality towards the Kyoto Protocol is clouding its ability to talk about disagreement and compromise. Luckily, I think that’s just me being overly cynical. I haven’t read that Guardian article beyond the intro, but I bet if I read it now, it’ll show just how cynical I’m being–

Murphy describes Kyoto as “a parable about agreement”. And [Murphy and Robertson] explain that, long before hitting upon their subject, they had been asking questions about the “scary” world in which we all live, and had begun to see how critical consensus was. The Jungle, they add, touched on this too – asking how people from different countries can live together: “How can we find a common ground? Because we can keep arguing but… how do we move forward?”

What, then, does agreement depend upon? “Human will, energy, force of character – the conviction there is a way forward together. But the even bigger question is: do we have what it takes to see the other side even when we might not like what we see?”

To Murphy and Robertson’s credit, Kyoto doesn’t feel like a throwback to some hallowed time. But the “parable of agreement” line really fucks me up, because Kyoto doesn’t feel Fukuyama-pilled. The action is too often driven by people who identify where agreement isn’t possible, and move anyway. The low-lying islands don’t split off from G77 because they believe they can talk their way to common ground with Saudi Arabia; Raul doesn’t kidnap 195 delegates overnight to have an open discussion about his targets and timelines. These characters do have a conviction that there is a way forward, together or otherwise. But they also realise that, for this conviction to mean anything, they need to recognise when the other side is not acting in good faith, and act before they do. Kyoto is actually really good at making that point.

Call Me

Towards the end of the play, Murphy and Robertson deploy a classic sleight-of-hand monologue. Don leaves a voicemail for his son, Brad, who’s just started working for the Democrats, telling him how proud he is of his son’s hard work, how much he loves him, and how much this whole Kyoto fiasco has convinced him that things are changing. “There comes a time in a man’s life when he realises it’s not his world anymore.” Then the play skips back, and Don leaves the real message. “Hey Brad, it’s your Dad. Call me.”

Don’s confession, and his withdrawal, is a pitch-perfect illustration of the calculus at play in the minds of the people who hold the most power. The resistance to the idea that they share a mutual responsibility for the health of the planet; the refusal to talk with and listen to other voices, other countries, other generations. Don thinks about ceding the world to his son but does not do that. Fuck, he doesn’t even cede his emotions to his son, his pride or his fear or his sadness.

Instead, Don keeps finding new ways to dominate and control and exploit. He keeps destroying until he dies, much like the US and the UK and all the other powers who fought tooth and nail to avoid making concessions at Kyoto. Murphy and Robertson make that clear in Shirley’s final monologue, in which she makes an unexpected, minor-key callback to an earlier monologue by the Japanese representative (sorry, he doesn’t get a name either). The Japanese representative tells a story about the many seasons in Japanese culture, how they are determined by the vicissitudes of nature, including, in this instance, how early the sakura blossoms fall. Shirley, in her last line, still in Japan, looks up, distracted, and calls our attention to the sakura blossoms. Even post-Kyoto, they’re falling out of season.

Even if the writers have sold it as a ‘parable of agreement’, the Kyoto we’ve got is asking us, who is refusing to move forward here? The nations full of people whose homes and lives are at risk from climate change, or the nations who perceive any kind of climate action as an affront to their ‘freedoms’ as hegemonic powers? And when we see that refusal, what do we do? Do we recognise it and act accordingly, or do we just keep moving to meet the powerful, until we all die?

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That's all for this week! I’d like to get back to a regular schedule, maybe even the schedule I sent in my first email in January 2024, but that clearly didn’t help me write so the next thing will come when it comes. I hope that’s okay!If you have thoughts about this one, I’m pretty sure you can email me here. And if you liked it, please share it out!

Until then, thanks for reading! Keep safe, keep well, keep sinewy,

Adam