Climate Change Is Must-See Theater in London. Meet the Playwrights Behind “Kyoto”

Negotiations over the 1997 United Nations climate agreement might not seem the sort of stuff that could draw sold-out audiences to London’s West End. Think again. “Kyoto,” a play that dramatizes the first legally binding global pact to set emission targets is a hot ticket. 

Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Good Chance Productions, “Kyoto” was conceived by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, young playwrights whose previous collaborations include “The Jungle,” an award-winning drama about a refugee encampment near the port of Calais, France. “Kyoto” premiered in 2024 in Stratford-Upon-Avon and opened in January in London at @sohoplace.

Murphy and Robertson recently chatted with Inside Climate News about their work. The talks leading to the Kyoto Protocol, they found, offered a way to explain the stakes of a warming planet and the convictions of the scientists, delegates and lawyers, including a wily American lobbyist named Donald Pearlman who participated. 

The playwrights have silkened the sticky jargon of U.N. reports into sometimes humorous, clear and often sobering dialogue. Audience members slip on lanyards—tagging themselves as if delegates—when they enter the theater-in-the-round, a hint that no one can be just an observer to climate change.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

CHRISTINE SPOLAR: How did you decide climate change could be good theater?

JOE MURPHY: I think if we were setting out originally with that question, we might still be here. It’s a difficult subject, and it’s difficult for all its immense complexities. … But actually, the way that we came at it was from a sense of concern about political polarization. 

In truth, we were worried about the seeming sort of growing obsession in our society with disagreement, and the sort of entrenched personal opinions that you could see on individual levels. You could see on national levels. You could see on international levels. A seeming unwillingness to enter a process of agreement about really, really important stuff. So we found ourselves asking the question-–why should that be the case?-–and also searching for stories that would really valorize the idea of agreement and the importance of agreement. You know, the process of agreement involves compromise almost by definition. Getting people attracted to that idea once again felt like a decent contribution to make.

JOE ROBERTSON: Then we discovered the story of Kyoto by accident. We were in the car listening to the radio, and heard a few of the people who were there, a few of the delegates, people from environmental engineering NGOs, talking about this amazing moment in history when the world unanimously agreed to legally binding emissions targets for the first and, actually, possibly last time. 

We’d heard about the COPs happening every year [the U.N. meetings known as the Conference of the Parties that debate and assess progress in combating climate change] and that the world gets together and talks about these things. But we realized we didn’t know anything about them. We didn’t know what went on inside those U.N. corridors. We didn’t know the contours of the debate. 

So we’d set about researching and emailed everyone we could find—from delegates to scientists to lawyers to world leaders—and embarked on this amazing series of conversations with people who shared their experiences and memories and wisdom about that time. We just were blown away by the emotion and the drama and the jeopardy and the pride with which they talked about these multilateral sort of gatherings. And their pride at what they achieved. 

It just felt like this whole new lens to view the climate crisis. It was a human lens. And it was deeply, deeply personal. As playwrights we are always trying to make the political personal. We’re always trying to make these big, almost sort of intractable, difficult-to-describe things really relatable on a human level. That was when we went: OK, we got a play.