“It will never be forgiven.” With those chilling words, delivered just days ago, the UN climate chief branded our reckless indulgence in fossil-fueled destruction as a transgression so grave it stains the conscience of humankind, and he is not being dramatic! From Stratford-upon-Avon to London’s West End, and now at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new play Kyoto help us understand how we got to the Cop30 summit, bringing this global reckoning to the stage and successfully transforming bureaucratic negotiation into high-stakes human drama. It dramatizes the painful procession of meetings that began in 1990 and culminated in the 1997 Kyoto summit, the world’s first serious attempt to help the planet heal before it finally shows us the door.

Co-produced by Good Chance, this striking political docudrama by playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, centers on this question: who decides what and who is worth saving when the entire planet is at stake? Thousands of diplomats more worried about upsetting their countries’ GDP and lobbies than the climate change met for almost a decade armed with statistics, speeches, and an impressive capacity for polite procrastination. The bureaucratic ballet of good intentions and self-interest shown in Kyoto is almost obscene; progress pirouettes endlessly between competing egos, half-measures, phrasing, commas, brackets, quotes, and coffee breaks before exiting stage with nothing accomplished.

It is absurd that the species that invented fossil fuels has been attempting, with solemn conviction, to negotiate its own survival, but we need only one voice to explain how we got here: Don Pearlman, an American oil lobbyist and legal strategist whose amorality makes him both protagonist and antagonist. Stephen Kunken, reprising his Olivier-nominated role as Pearlman, commands the stage with the charm of a snake-oil salesman, equal parts charisma and rot. Kunken constantly negotiates with the audience, persuading us to like him against our better judgment. Jorge Bosch’s Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, by contrast, brings moral weight to the chaos, representing the sincere idealist who carries the weight of principle in a room full of pragmatists. Bosch gives us gravitas without sanctimony, and the chemistry between him and Kunken is electric, a battle of ethics masked as negotiation.

Around this combustible duo, the ensemble performs with meticulousness. Kate Burton’s “USA” is a marvel of controlled diplomacy; she gives us a performance that radiates both the authority and the exhaustion of representing a superpower, comical and fragile, witty and strapping. Peter Bradbury’s Fred Singer, the climate skeptic, provides acidic comic relief; Erin Darke’s Germany brings pragmatism and deadpan humor; Dariush Kashani (Saudi Arabia), Feodor Chin (China), and Rob Narita (Japan) each sketch their nations’ positions avoiding caricature, effectively playing roles that could easily have become stereotypes.

Natalie Gold’s Shirley, Pearlman’s wife, offers a human counterpoint to the geopolitical game; Imani Jade Powers imbues the Secretariat with precision as the bureaucratic core of the play; while Ferdy Roberts, the U.K.’s John Prescott, swaggers through the negotiations with bulldog determination. Roslyn Ruff’s Tanzania and Taiana Tully’s Kiribati provide the voices of nations who contribute least to the crisis but stand to lose the most, and their scenes ground the abstract debates in lived consequence.

Together, under the brilliant direction of Daldry and Martin, the cast performs the near-impossible: they make negotiations thrilling. What might have been a boring litany of acronyms and procedural jargon becomes pure human drama, full of humor, heart, and moral tension. Every scene feels choreographed with the precision of a summit meeting: delegates circling, alliances forming and fracturing, the room pulsing with polite panic. Miriam Buether’s set is a perfect example of conceptual clarity: a large negotiation table encircled by audience seating, immersive, ironic, and familiar. The audience, seated as “delegates,” becomes complicit in the act of deliberation, feeling our collective inability to make important decisions. Natalie Pryce’s costumes are understated but eloquent; suits and silk ties, diplomatic shawls, and lanyards. Her palette renders the world’s representatives as interchangeable silhouettes, like corporate soldiers in the war for consensus.

Aideen Malone’s lighting emphasizes the play’s emotional geography. Fluorescent panels overhead give way to warm glows of hope or the cool of despair. Her work rises and falls like the tides of debate, with flashes of brilliance followed by long, shadowed pauses of doubt and ambiguity. Akhila Krishnan’s video projections provide real-time data, headlines, and archival footage that bleed across the set, reminding the audience that this is history replaying itself, pixel by pixel. Christopher Reid’s sound design underscores the production with the hum of translation headsets, the buzz of air-conditioning, the shuffle of papers, basically a symphony of administrative dread. Paul Englishby’s score threads through it all like a heartbeat under pressure, blending corporate motifs with melancholic strings.

Rather than depicting melting ice caps or future dystopias, Murphy and Robertson (with the help of Gemma Stockwood’s dramaturgy) dramatize the process of change itself, and Kyoto unfolds as both allegory and thriller. Its portrayal of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and idealists sparring over language to secure what they truly want, exposes how fragile our notion of progress really is, and still, the play refuses despair, it reminds us that hope is vital. A remarkable work, not to be missed!

photos by Emilio Madrid

Kyoto
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center
ends on November 30, 2025
for tickets, visit LCT