How to Make Thrilling Theater About Climate Change Negotiations

When the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson were looking for ideas for a new production, they stumbled upon a radio show about the negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Some parts of the show, Robertson recalled in a recent interview, made the culmination of those discussions about lowering global carbon emissions sound “like a thriller,” with politicians holding talks in locked rooms and exhausted negotiators falling asleep beneath their desks.

The pair thought that the landmark climate agreement could be the basis for another impactful stage production, similar to “The Jungle,” their hit about a refugee encampment in northern France. The problem was that the negotiations had dragged on for years before the agreement was reached in Kyoto in December 1997 — and that process was at times far from exciting. Most of the action involved representatives from different countries arguing over the language, and even punctuation, they wanted in the protocol.

Climate negotiations “are so bloody boring in one sense,” Robertson said. “The challenge,” he added, “was, ‘How do we do take them, put it onstage and make it dramatic?’”

The playwrights’ answer to that question is “Kyoto,” directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, and running at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, from Tuesday through July 13.