Kyoto

This marks a welcome return to the heart of the West End by the RSC with a splashy, current, piece of new writing directed by Stephen Daldry (with Justin Martin), which is a perfect fit for the great Soho Place.

Good Chance were previously responsible for the international immersive hit The Jungle about the asylum seekers in Calais which also played across the US. So, the pedigree is great and the anticipation huge, but the result is muddled with a piece that plays to the choir.

Daldry and Martin give us a breathless and gripping tale of the fateful hours of tense negotiation which led up to the historic signing of the UN's landmark climate change deal in Kyoto in December 1997.

Designer Miriam Buether transforms the stage into the conference table with delegates seated all around and the action taking place on top. This dynamism here recalls the trademark Walk-with-me energy of an episode of The West Wing. And of course it is needed, as the subjects here, climate science and the placement of commas in draft wordings, are not exactly theatrical.

What is very theatrical though is how it explores the dark arts of negotiation and arbitration, and this could apply to any topic. The ploys are standard – the stonewalling, the peacocking, the use of protocols as blocking tactics, and most scarily the infiltration of the process by outsiders, in this case dubious NGOs, whose purpose here was to stall and hopefully derail the talks by having our man in the room.

The piece gives a good chronological account but for dramatic purposes it is terribly stacked. It's framed around Don Pearlman, a mercenary lobbyist for oil companies/countries who was determined to prevent any targets or deadlines that would stick. Stephen Kunken is suitably reptilian as Don, and we know he's the bad guy because the lights dim and the sinister cabal who fund him cluster round to egg him on. This is unlike the saintly but smart young woman delegate from Kiribati (Andrea Gatchalian) or the firebrand anti-imperialist from Tanzania (Aïcha Kossoko) whose halos would make St Francis blush. Fatally, the writers then try to humanise Pearlman by giving him a quietly patient wife (Jenna Augen) and even terminal cancer, but it's too late for the audience in the sympathy stakes.

One wonders how better it might have been had they used another of the key players as the way in. There is the wily Argentinean Conference Chair, Estrada, played with great comic relish by Jorge Bosh, or the crafty American delegate (Nancy Crane) who has to spend the whole time taking the ire of the developing world. Crane is great especially when she has to play hardball with China, over the nonsensical emissions trading. You can't be a poor state and a rich one at the same time. She also faces the ire of the island states, the Chinese, the Saudis and even the pesky Europeans, who are generally an uncoordinated mess until in pops John Prescott to front them. Blair, rightly, thought that Prescott who was a genius at cutting deals from his early years as a top trade union negotiator, might be the right man for this job. He absolutely was, and Ferdy Roberts perfectly captures that mix of bluster and thin-skinned chippiness which defined him.

Prescott rightly called it diplomacy by exhaustion, when 150 countries have a veto, and this gets to the nub of it. Tiredness, hunger and desperation wears everyone down until a deal is struck but is this ever sensibly sustainable? It's like evidence secured under torture. The current mess we're in with the US about to pull out of the Paris Agreement gives us the answer, which is no. But the only consolations ultimately were that Kyoto worked, that most countries stuck to their targets, progress was made, and at least someone tried.

There didn't appear to be anyone in this audience who might need convincing of the case being made here and those who do wouldn't darken the door, which is the problem. It's all a bit rushed and manic however and one wonders if the material might fare better as a miniseries, where the mixed motives and human foibles of this motley bunch could be explored with more nuance.

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Kyoto

The pedigree is great and the anticipation huge, but the result is muddled with a piece that plays to the choir.