How do you dramatise the climate crisis? It is, of course, one of the most pressing issues in global geopolitics, but not one that lends itself with immediate obviousness to a theatrical setting. Who, for example, would be the leading characters? The last thing anyone wants is a primary school-style jamboree, with actors portraying melting ice caps and rising sea levels.
Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the founders of Good Chance and writers of The Jungle, that much-praised drama about the infamous Calais refugee camp, have hit upon an inspired idea: make your (anti)-hero one of the “baddies”, a voice from the wrong side of the climate change fence, and follow him as he desperately tries to scupper the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which established the world’s first legally binding emissions targets. Step forward Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), American oil lobbyist and strategist, a man who served in the Department for Energy during the Reagan Administration.
Pearlman is talked into his role by a shady cabal of petrostate interests, a mafia-like group of figures in long black coats. New to the climate issue, he takes us with him on his steep learning curve – and the first half of Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin’s kinetic production is a dense whirl through significant events in the months and years leading up to Kyoto.
There can be no escaping the fact that what Murphy and Robertson offer us resembles, at times, a series of international committee meetings, with all the thrill factor that implies. The furiously driven Don – “countries you had never even heard of were facing us down”, he says incredulously at one juncture – is softened and humanised by the figure of his wife Shirley (Jenna Augen), but elsewhere fully rounded characters are hard to come by. What is made graphically clear, however, are the blocs of conflicting interests as 176 countries attempt to reach consensus. Andrea Gatchalian makes urgent impact as the representative of Kiribati and spokesperson for the Alliance of Small Island States.
The second half is the all-important Kyoto-set COP 3, presided over by maverick Argentine chairman Raúl Estrada-Oyuela and attended by, among others, John Prescott (Ferdy Roberts). Around Miriam Buether’s round conference-style table of a set, which craftily involves some audience members, the arguments are frenzied and detailed, down to the minutiae of individual adjectives and pieces of punctuation.
Kunken is utterly convincing as a ruthless operator who keeps a minatory eye on all key participants, increasingly frenzied and sleep deprived as he realises that things just might not go his way. “The euphoria of Kyoto was short-lived,” a sobering line in the programme reminds us, but that’s for another day, another play.
This is a rich and vital production and one that is likely to clock up many hundreds of travel miles in a continuing journey after its sojourn in Stratford.
To 13 July (01789 331111, rsc.org.uk)
