Pious bilge: Kyoto, at @sohoplace, reviewed

The West End’s new political show, Kyoto, can’t be classed as a drama. A drama involves a main character engaged in a transformative personal journey. This is a secretarial round-up of various environmental summits, or ‘Cop’ meetings, held during the late 1980s and 1990s. If you remove the private jets, a Cop summit is a sort of parish council seminar about the probable weather during the summer fête. The material is extremely dull and yet it’s possible to turn dross into a gripping story if you hire a dramatist.

So Big Oil has been torching the planet for 66 years and yet the West End hasn’t been burned to ashes

The authors, Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, aren’t up to the job and their script is a blank list of speeches and events read out by soulless busybodies. It might have been written by a stenographer. For two and a half hours, the characters sit at a conference table waving their arms around and shouting at each other. Admirers of racial stereotyping will find much to enjoy here. The white characters are all calm, eloquent and authoritative. The non-whites are surly, charmless and hysterical. A plump Tanzanian woman demands reparations and declares that her fellow Africans are skinny because all the food has been eaten by westerners. A crazed delegate from Polynesia rants about flooding. ‘We will not drown in silence,’ she shrieks. A comedy Spaniard provides light relief by mangling his English. ‘Let’s keep our eyeses on the prizes,’ he says. He takes a siesta every afternoon, of course. An arrogant British diplomat worries that some attendees can’t understand acronyms. ‘Translation for the morons in the room,’ he says, referring to the third-world delegates.