Gripping political thriller explores 'cut-throat diplomacy'

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 10 years of negotiation leading up to Kyoto – will likely rely on a narrator to guide the audience through, said David Benedict in Variety. 

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". 

by Jon Fosse     

"Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse," said Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Observer. The latest of his works to be published in Britain (in an elegant translation by Damion Searls) is this haunting two-part novella, which appeared in Norway in 2000. In part one, a child is born in a remote fishing community. The story is told from the perspective of its father, as he "waits anxiously in the kitchen". The much longer second part takes place decades later: the baby born that day, Johannes, is now an old man, living alone, and going about his morning routine. But as he makes coffee, and sets off on a walk, he is gripped by an overpowering sense that "everything" is "different".

"Eventually the penny drops," said Houman Barekat in the Financial Times. Johannes died that morning; he has become a ghost. "Morning and Evening" is a novel about the "first and last days" of a man's life. Written in Fosse's distinctive prose style – a spare minimalism with almost no full stops – this is a "work of graceful, spine-tingling beauty".

Avant-garde director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks

David Lynch, who has died aged 78, once said that, as a child, he had been "saved" by his mother encouraging him to draw not in colouring books but on pieces of scrap paper. It meant, he said, that he no longer had to "stay within the lines". A natural rebel, whose artistic spirit was at odds with the 1950s suburbia of his youth, he became one of Hollywood's most distinctively avant-garde directors. His films ("Mulholland Drive"; "Blue Velvet"; "Wild at Heart") were so singular – disjointed, dark and often unnerving – his name became an adjective: Lynchian. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it refers to the juxtaposition of "surreal or sinister elements" with the "mundane", and the use of rich visual imagery, to create a "dreamlike quality of mystery or menace". Yet in person, Lynch practised a sort of "performative normality", said The New York Times. He almost invariably dressed in dark slacks and a dress shirt buttoned to the top, with no tie; for years, he drank a milkshake with his lunch at Bob's Big Boy diner in LA; and in interviews – and in the daily weather reports he posted online – he came across as folksy and affable, "at once laconic and gee-whiz". Mel Brooks once described him as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars".

He was born in Montana in 1946 to Donald, a research scientist with the US Department of Agriculture, and his wife Edwina. His father's job meant they moved repeatedly during his childhood, with stints in cities in Idaho, North Carolina and Virginia. After graduating from high school, he studied art, first in Boston and later in Philadelphia, which was then in economic decline. It had a "great mood", he said – "factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters and the darkest night", and also provided him with striking visual imagery: "plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows". He became interested in the idea of moving paintings and, in the late 1960s, he started making short art films. He produced his debut feature – "Eraserhead" – in 1977, having worked on it for five years. Filmed in black and white, and set in an industrial hellscape where a man with a pompadour haircut tends to a mewling reptilian baby, it opened at midnight in a cinema in Greenwich Village, and by word of mouth, became a cult favourite.

On the back of it, Brooks asked him to direct "The Elephant Man", based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was paraded as a circus freak in Victorian Britain. The film won Lynch the first of four Oscar nominations. His next project, a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic "Dune" starring Kyle MacLachlan, was a flop. But he bounced back with the voyeuristic and violent erotic thriller "Blue Velvet", in which a student (MacLachlan again) in a white-picket-fence suburb is drawn into a dark world by his discovery of a severed ear. Like many of Lynch's films, it made unsettling use of the music of his youth. MacLachlan also starred (as an FBI agent) in "Twin Peaks", Lynch's surrealist murder mystery, which became a small-screen phenomenon in 1990. Later that decade, Lynch surprised many by directing "The Straight Story", a sentimental drama about a man who drives his lawn mower across the US to visit his sick brother; but then returned to more familiar form with the LA-set neo-noir mystery "Mulholland Drive".

Lynch sometimes commented on his work. "This is the way America is to me," he said of "Blue Velvet". "There's a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there's a horror and a sickness as well." But he was just as likely to deflect questions. Asked what "Wild at Heart" (1990) was about, he replied: "Well, it's about one hour and forty-five minutes." He is survived by his fourth wife, and his four children, one from each of his marriages.