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.

SPOLAR:The story hinges on how to define climate change. That’s a very wordy and perhaps worthy endeavor, but again, very wordy. Can you explain the process of using the language of the IPCC reports [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments that are notoriously dense] for this? 

MURPHY:Well, at first glance it may not appear to be the most fruitful material for dramatic material, but actually, if you sort of scratch away at the surface, very quickly there’s a world of language that comes with the COPs and all its research, which is always interesting as a starting point. 

But crucially, as dramatists, you’re looking for conflict. You’re looking for oppositions within the story. And given that we were writing, or trying to write, about both climate change and this notion of agreement, coming across the person who became our central character, Don Pearlman, was a really, really crucial moment in the process. 

Because Don Pearlman exists in the play, in the world of the play, as an agent of disagreement. 

And so suddenly we’d happened upon a character who, in a sense, did not want this play to happen. He certainly did not want it to reach the conclusion that the play eventually reaches—one of unanimous agreement. And so suddenly we had a play where we had a protagonist working in one direction and the rest of the play working in another. And that was a really exciting moment. At that point, we found ourselves in a very human situation. 

You know, it’s difficult trying to get hold of a huge subject like climate change, which relates to and affects literally every single person in the world. How do you characterize it on an individual level? But we suddenly felt like we’d found something-–and that central conflict in the play illuminated the whole thing for us.

ROBERTSON: On the language front, the U.N. process offers a linguistic landscape that is really exciting. Delegates, the secretariat, talk in a sort of artificial way like: “the distinguished delegate has the floor” or “will the distinguished delegate.”… When you are writing a play or a piece of drama, it’s always nice to have a linguistic framework that you can build upon. We write very rhythmically anyway, but those linguistic motifs allow you to build rhythm and then build humor. There are lots of acronyms, we had a glossary of acronyms because there are so many. And they can become a source of humor that help you push and create a rhythm.

MURPHY:You know, you spend a little bit of time in the play building the idea of the importance of acronyms within the world of the U.N., and then the audience has a requisite level of understanding. So when you get to the character of Ben Santer [a climate scientist who was a pivotal contributor to six IPCC assessments] and he’s talking about the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory program and saying—dutta dutta dutta and a really long acronym, well, suddenly, people can laugh at that. Because, as Joe said, they understand the linguistic landscape. That’s actually wonderful stuff to play with.

SPOLAR:You raise the idea of commas to a new art form.

MURPHY:That’s the more geeky side of us, I suppose, coming out. Quite early on we’d understood from very, very important figures, Raul Estrada, the chairman for Kyoto, and particularly Farhana Yamin, a crucial lawyer involved in the formation and organization of AOSIS [the Alliance of Small Island States], the importance of them. She speaks quite wonderfully about the significance of square brackets-–and how you can spend a lot of time debating sentences that grammatically are not correct. People are so tired, and the debates take so long that you can lose your focus. And then commas sort of appear in the wrong places. 

And that to us, as sort of linguistic geeks, was again a bit of a gift. 

ROBERTSON: As playwrights, as writers, we found actually an enormous sense of affinity with what they were doing, creating a protocol, because they’re actually engaged in this collective writing process. They are creating a text and seeing that that text evolve over many iterations and many, many sets of talks. And that’s very similar to how a play evolves and grows over many series of workshops and rehearsals. Every scene, every line, every word, is a sort of negotiation. We have those debates about commas, we have those debates about which adjective to use—and that is very close to what happens in those U.N. rooms.

MURPHY:In a weird way, it did become a way of us talking about a very personal reality. 

SPOLAR:How did you find Don Pearlman, a central character of the play? He’s an American. He is a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. And he’s a particular kind of Washington character. How did you find him, through research?

ROBERTSON:We kept seeing his name pop up in the footnotes of books or as a side note in interviews.

We heard about an unofficial rule in the U.N. called the Don Pearlman rule, which banned NGO observers from participating in negotiations on the conference floor, and so our dramatic antennae sort of cropped up. 

We went online and tried to find things about him. We could find one or two photos, but very, very little information. And actually, the many diplomats we spoke to were very diplomatic and didn’t tell us much. So in the end, we managed to get hold of members of his family. We talked to his son and to his widow, Shirley. 

And I guess we’d established him, in our heads, as the sort of the monster oil lobbyist who was taking a wrecking ball to the negotiations, which in one sense he was. But what we learned from them was the man. The loving father and husband and brother, grandfather, uncle. The cognitive dissonance of that, of someone who did profoundly difficult things but who is also this human being, as dramatists, again, that was a really important moment. Especially in a play that asks on a human level, how we take a step towards things we don’t agree with, how we take a step towards opinions and perspectives that might seem abhorrent to us, in that necessary process of moving forward together.

MURPHY:Ibsen received a piece of advice that really set his whole career. He was told: a drama is a thing in which every character thinks that they’re right. And the plot is the battleground for them expressing how they are right. 

And it became very important to us to try to express how Don thought that he was right, how Saudi Arabia thought that they were right, how China, the U.S., the U.K., every single person comes into this with their own set of circumstances, their own attitudes, their own specific needs on a sovereign level. It felt like it would be a really important thing to do, to watch those things play out in sequence. 

And with Don, in spite of or perhaps because of what he did, it became even more important for that to be the case with his character.

SPOLAR:I could tell some people in the audience saw him as a villain. I think he saw himself as a hero. He believed in heroic figures. He sees America, in his personal life and his family history as heroic, and he sees Ronald Reagan as heroic. How did you deal with his very complicated self image?

ROBERTSON: He served as an undersecretary in the Department of Energy under Reagan and, and, I think, is what one would describe as a classic Reaganite Republican. He really believed in America to its core. 

He believed in what America stood for, stands for, of freedom, of democracy, of open societies. And I think from his own perspective, what was happening in the U.N. at that time was a threat to that. So I suppose he is fighting his own hero’s journey. And you’ve perfectly summarized what our lead actor, our brilliant colleague, Stephen Kunken, who plays Don says. He sometimes plays villains, quite a lot of villains. And he says: I’m never playing a villain. I’m always playing the hero in my own story. Because everyone feels, of themselves, a little bit a hero. They have a moral framework.

So Don believes that he’s trying to protect the right of an individual to buy the car they want to, to start the business that they want to, to make the choices that they as individuals want to make. And that’s the problem with climate change. Left to our own devices, we would probably make the wrong decisions. 

I think [Don] feels, at the core, there is a threat to the country that gave him everything.

MURPHY: It’s particularly interesting talking about Don’s idea of America at a moment like this. We started the show in Stratford-upon-Avon last summer, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Swan Theater, and that was before the recent election. And you know, huge, huge things have happened in the world since then. 

The play is very much alive at the moment. And the idea that it is possible to believe in a version of America that is noble, that is virtuous, at this moment in time, is absurd often to an audience. There can be huge laughter at statements about the virtue of America. But it has been the case that America has been a noble and brilliant engine for the world. I’d like to think that can be the case again, in spite of this difficult moment that we’re in.

ROBERTSON: And when Don says, “I believe America is one of the great human accomplishments,” he believes it to his core.

MURPHY:He’s also not necessarily wrong. And I suppose that’s the intrigue of this moment. It does feel like Don is wrong in that statement at this moment in time. But I think it is more complicated than that.

America has been a great, great source of innovation across so many different sectors and industries. One of the ideas sort of implicit in Don’s philosophy is that there’s an extinction curve and that there’s an innovation curve. In his opinion, the innovation curve will move quicker and bend quicker than the extinction curve. But that’s, of course, Don’s set of opinions.

SPOLAR:Stephen Kunken has likened you to reporters, that you delve in, you read, you research. Are you reporters? 

ROBERTSON: We’re definitely dramatists because, as Don says at the start of the play and we say in the play text, we’ve very much conflated 10 years of negotiations into a two-and-a-half- hour play. So you’re not going to get a documentary from this show, but you are going to get an attempt to, as truthfully as possible, capture the spirit and the essence of what happened. 

The final night of negotiations, which has gone down in sort of multilateral history, we managed to get an almost minute-by-minute accounting. Where was that person? Where was that group? That delegation was talking to that delegation, in that room? In [the musical] Hamilton, it’s [about] the room where it happened, no one knows how the sausage gets made. And we were like: Well, we want to know how the sausage got made. We tried to talk to as many people—where you were?—and combine that with this book and that book. In that respect, there’s something journalistic in that but the process to make it drama, I think, pulls it away from that.

MURPHY:We’re very inspired by incredible writers like David Hare, an unbelievable artist. … He’s somebody who goes to places, goes to situations and burrows beneath the surface. But what he brings back is human drama, human conflict, human character.

ROBERTSON: There is something that drama can show us that journalism might struggle to. Which is about those human relationships. I think they can work hand in hand.

MURPHY:And we’d be amiss if we didn’t sort of mention a deep love of poetry in all of this. Joe spoke earlier about a sort of rhythmical style of writing. However journalistic or politically characterized things are, in the end, they go through what is a fundamentally artistic process. And we love doing that. 

SPOLAR:You’ve done a play about migration—“The Jungle” when you were in your 20s—and now you’ve done climate. Do you see those two aspects of our society right now as interconnected? 

ROBERTSON: You’re never entirely sure what you are doing. … We found ourselves living and working in the refugee camp in Calais at the age of 24 and 25. It was in the midst of the European refugee crisis, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Syria, and then there were people across the Middle East and North Africa, crossing the Mediterranean and Aegean [seas]. There was hysteria in the international press, some terrible language…. It felt like a hinge moment. 

So we just decided to take our car and get a ferry and go to bear witness. We took some donations that people gave us, and we stopped in this temporary encampment on the coast of France that was growing and growing, and ended up living and working there. We built a theater and made art with the 25 nationalities of people who lived there and we made some lifelong friends. And that was the beginning of our theater company, Good Chance. 

In that camp, we saw what became the basis of our artistic philosophy, which is lots of different people trying to live together, trying to survive, trying to understand each other. And that seemed to be a microcosm of the world, of our cities that we live in, of the problems on the world stage. …

We made that sort of our life’s work, really. The issue of migration, I think, is defining the political weather in America and in Europe. And I think we saw how the climate story just came naturally out of that. …The U.N.’s IPCC has predicted half a billion people on the move in the next 30 years, or something like that. They are linked. Both issues will come to define, I think, the future for all of us.

MURPHY:There are other important things that interconnect with both of these issues. It seems very obvious that consideration is needed about artificial intelligence and those kinds of technologies. … So there is much to do and much to consider.

SPOLAR:In the play there’s an unnamed character that [Don’s wife] Shirley Pearlman encounters as a tourist at Kiyomizu Temple. Can you explain the conversation and why it was important to include? 

ROBERTSON:We talked to a lot of people who were involved in the negotiations, who said that if they’d have known then what we know now, about what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change, about the science, that it would have been totally different. They didn’t realize the research that had been going on at a lot of the companies-–research that had predated the official U.N. science by many, many years and was hidden. That felt important to represent.

In that scene Shirley, Don’s wife, is interacting with a sort of NGO observer—from the opposite side of Don. He tells her that he speaks through history. He says, in 1959, Edward Teller the scientist predicted everything, predicted global warming, predicted sea level rise—and the fossil fuel companies buried that information. She finds this out and has to make her own choices. 

We spoke to a lot of people from the fossil fuel lobby and what surprised us was there was a lot of fear. … Both sides felt that they were being threatened. Both sides felt this sort of vitriolic anger and lack of human care. That was very interesting to us. I suppose there is something a little menacing about his character—of the observer-—felt important to have. 

To explain what happens when good faith breaks down, when trust breaks down, and both sides begin to view one another with suspicion, with cynicism. That answers to our main theme. When neither side tries to approach things in a fair, reasonable, human way, that really feeds polarization and the entrenchment of further division. 

MURPHY:It’s a really, really important scene for the whole play. And Shirley as a character in a sense is the only character that changes in the play, which is odd for a play. You’d expect all your characters to go on their own sort of journeys in relation to the subject matter, but actually most of our characters have an established position that they mostly have to adhere to. 

Shirley is different. She’s a citizen, and she goes on a journey and in relation to the subject matter. That scene is a big, big moment for her as she begins to question what is happening in the world. 

ROBERTSON: At the heart of the play is this other character, Raoul Estrada, who is Argentinian and chair of the COP. He’s this amazing force of agreement, an amazing human force full of humor, of goodwill. … We talked to him several times in the research process. When we asked him about Don, he said he and his wife would have dinner with Don and his wife Shirley. And we said, “Gosh, you had dinner with him.” And he said, “Well, of course. You know, we could disagree about policy, but we could agree on the wine.” He was always trying to forge human connections with people on all sides of the political divide. He was trying to create, in his words, zones of agreement where everyone could be together, united by the common beliefs that are greater than those that divide us. That felt like such a profound philosophy for our modern times.

SPOLAR: There’s a scene when Shirley asks Don, ”Are we on the wrong side of history?” Is that, in fact, the big question of the play? 

MURPHY:It felt like a question that needed to be asked by someone within the world of the play. It felt like that would be one of the concerns and paranoias of our set of characters That they might imagine that they’ve got this wrong. I mean, it’s certainly up there with the very important questions. I hope there are other ones as well. 

One of the things that the timeline of the play offers is that we pass the point by which it’s possible to deny that there is a connection between man-made emissions and climate change. Once Ben Santer and his fingerprinting process [a scientific data tracking of emissions] has happened, it’s not possible to deny that in the same way anymore. Everyone after that point has to make a decision about their behavior––or their behavior will be viewed in a different light.

ROBERTSON:And I guess that is a question. Why did [Don] carry on even when he knew the science was clear? That is as much a question for us, too, because we all know the science is clear now. You know, in a sense, we carry on, knowing what we know. So there is a provocation in that. Don is closer to us than you know. He’s easy to view as a villain. But I think he becomes alive when we realize he’s not as far away from all of us as we think.

SPOLAR: Because you talked to the family, did Shirley say he recognized that climate change was human made?

ROBERTSON:I think they feel that if he’d lived longer—he passed away in 2005—that he would have changed as the science became much clearer. Which, of course, we can’t know. 

… They were very clear he would have been appalled at what’s happened to the GOP and what it is now. 

SPOLAR:Is this play about a success in climate negotiations or a broader failure? What followed didn’t really fulfill the agreement. 

ROBERTSON:Good question. I found a lot of hope in the fact that although America [its Congress] didn’t ratify, most of the countries did meet the targets in the timetables. And the combined emissions of the developed world reduced by 22 percent even without America. [The agreement] didn’t go far enough, but it was and it still remains an incredible example of what multilateralism can achieve. 

MURPHY: At moments where cynicism feels very, very tempting, it’s important to dig in and really imagine what our situation would be like without the thing that one is about to criticize. It’s definitely true that the world would be in a much worse situation without the Kyoto Protocol. That is absolutely true. 

We can argue whether it was ever going to achieve enough or not. But one of the fundamental points, and one of the things that we feel is so important about the U.N., and really any democratic institution, is that they are slow. And each instrument of law is built on top of the next. That is by design. So that people can’t come in and destroy everything all at once. Trump and the U.S. have pulled out of [the] Paris [Agreement of 2015] but they are signed up to other things that remain in place, at least at this point in time.

ROBERTSON: We’re not experts in climate. We’re very much playwrights. … But when we talk to people involved, who were there, who still are there, we get the enormous sense that, yes, it’s flawed, but there is no other multilateral forum with 190 countries involved, where the developing world has such a powerful voice, built over many years. You know, these human processes are flawed, but they’re the best we’ve got.

MURPHY:And we certainly don’t have time to build new ones. 

SPOLAR: Did the Pearlman family like the play? It’s a little painful, I would think.

MURPHY:We definitely can’t speak on their behalf. But what we can say is that we’ve welcomed them to the play. One night they came was an incredible night in the theater, an absolutely wonderful, deeply moving night. And we’ve been overwhelmed by how generous they’ve been and supportive throughout the process. 

ROBERTSON: We always wanted to honor their generosity while writing something that we felt was accurate. Their only request of us was to remember [Don] was a human being. 

SPOLAR: Is “Kyoto” going to New York?

ROBERTSON: We don’t know yet. We’ve got weeks here [the play runs into May]. We’ll let you know as soon as we know.