‘We want the audience to feel there is hope’: how to

The latest play from the writing duo focuses on the landmark 1997 climate conference in Kyoto, Japan. During rehearsals, they talk about the importance of consensus, and the challenges of turning negotiations into drama

The rehearsal room in London’s Bethnal Green has a concentrated, businesslike and anticipatory atmosphere. It is filled with people sitting at tables with microphones in front of them, as though a conference were about to begin, which, in a sense, it is. On the stage’s periphery are directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin and the playwrights Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, co-founders of the Good Chance company, and I can see, even from a distance, how purposeful they all are. This is the same team that was responsible for The Jungle, the internationally celebrated show about the theatre the two Joes set up in Calais’s refugee camp. Now, they are halfway through rehearsals of a fascinating, meticulously researched and high-risk new project, Kyoto, about the UN’s climate conference of 1997.

The conference’s stated aim was to cut global greenhouse gases by 5% by 2012 and was the first building block in the introduction of climate legislation across the world, starting the process that led to the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, which included emissions pledges for all. The Kyoto protocol was signed, against seemingly impossible odds, by 84 countries and more than 100 more have since joined. Its effectiveness has been limited – the developed nations all met their targets (some with some judicious offsetting with other countries’ reductions), but global emissions have since soared. However, as the first summit at which the world’s nations started to come together, it has become an historic environmental landmark.