Last year, I had the pleasure of seeing Kyoto at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, a play about the 1997 United Nations Climate Change Conference (or COP3, for short). It was a fantastic production, so I was pleased it has transferred to London’s .
Stephen Kunken (pictured above) stars as Don Pearlman, a lawyer working for the fossil fuels lobby to prevent climate action. Pearlman is the kind of adversary you would dread: a brilliant strategist and libertarian firebrand, the devil in a dark grey suit.
Opposing him is the Argentinian diplomat Raúl Estrada-Oyuela (Jorge Bosch), Pearlman’s one-time friend, tasked with forcing the nations into agreement, sort of.
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The premise doesn’t sound likely to make for great theatre, but the result is tense, informative – and very funny. With last year’s COP29 reaching a deal far short of what is needed, clearly there is still much to learn from this story.
