‘Kyoto’ Review: A Riveting, Fast-Paced Political Thriller About Climate Change Accords Makes West End Leap

variety.com:

David Benedict As urgent and vital as it is, an investigation into international angles on climate change doesn’t sound remotely theatrical, let alone a race-to-the finish thriller.

But that is precisely what directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin achieve with Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s strikingly smart “Kyoto.”Plays with as much necessary information as this — it covers ten years of increasingly vexed negotiations climaxing in 1997 at the third COP (Conference of the Parties) — require a heavy degree of information delivery, usually handled via a narrator.

And in a wearyingly earnest version of a story about the state of the planet, that narrator would be a heroic character predictably preaching to the choir about how an agreement to curb the behaviour of wicked fossil fuel companies was reached.

Murphy and Robertson’s masterstroke is to banish all such expectation and instead have the story narrated by a villain. Political with both a lowercase and capital P, this is the fierce story of how the very first global treaty in which countries large and small agreed to reduce CO₂ emissions came to pass.