Kyoto: 'total thrill ride' explores pivotal climate change conference

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's play Kyoto – first seen at the RSC in Stratford – is set at the UN Climate Change Conference in 1997, when countries around the world agreed the first international treaty on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Let's face it, this set-up sounds painfully worthy and dull, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out; yet the play turns out to be almost "indecently entertaining".

Wittily staged by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Kyoto features "globe-hopping storytelling", a "dizzying array" of compelling characters, and is a "total thrill ride". Any drama about such a complex event – the play covers ten years of negotiation leading up to Kyoto – will likely rely on a narrator to guide the audience through, said David Benedict in Variety.

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In a "wearyingly earnest" play about the Kyoto Protocol, that role would be taken by a heroic figure, "preaching to the choir" about the wickedness of Big Oil; Murphy and Robertson's "masterstroke" is to "banish" that expectation, and instead have the story told by a villain. Don Pearlman was a real-life American lawyer and lobbyist who was in the pay of the "seven sisters" group of major oil companies, and who sought to frustrate the deal. The upshot is a pacey, "race-to-the-finish thriller", in which the real subject is not the environment, but "cut-throat diplomacy".

Like a "leaner, more venal Richard III, Stephen Kunken's Pearlman casts the audience almost as co-conspirators" in his Machiavellian dealings, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. Yet he comes across more as an "outsized figure of disruptive fun" than as the dangerous player he was; and in its broad-brush approach, the play ducks some of the questions it raises about the American "freedom" Pearlman seems to want to protect, and the hypocrisy of the liberal West, when it comes to air travel, aircon and so on.

The play doesn't even have much to say about climate change and its impacts. Still, that it is so consistently gripping is "a triumph against the odds to match the Protocol itself".