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.
Directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin realise that this pious bilge can’t possibly entertain the public so they lay on a series of diversions to stop them from nodding off in their seats. The playing area is surrounded by 11 screens that light up with fancy graphics. Chic jazz tootles from the soundtrack. What about an inflatable rubber atlas that bounces around like a beachball? Worth a try. Or maybe a drum-kit would help. Yes, let’s give that a whirl. The drum-kit appears and a spare character bashes out a funky rhythm with a pair of sticks. Now what? A costume change may liven things up. Even better, let’s have a costume change on stage. An American character in a business suit walks to the centre of the playing area and removes his jacket. Then he unbuttons his shirt which he also removes. Next he replaces it with another shirt which he buttons up. This manoeuvre, which takes several minutes, represents the visual climax of Act One.
In Act Two, the delegates keep shouting and windmilling their arms at each other. A creepy journalist sidles on and shares a confidence. The major oil firms, he whispers, knew all about climate change back in 1959 and funded the green lobby in order to misdirect the public while they drilled for more oil and got even richer. That’s interesting. So Big Oil has been torching the planet for 66 years and yet the West End hasn’t been burned to ashes. The theatre itself is noticeably chilly too. Something doesn’t quite add up.
The show ends with the delegates, and those in the audience who are still awake, cheering the protocols signed at the 1997 Kyoto summit. Chief among these was the ‘emissions trading’ scheme which developed into one of the largest scams in the history of corporate crime. If you have tickets, take a blanket. Global warming has let us down.
If you have tickets, take a blanket. Global warming has let us down
The Maids is an oft-revived classic based on the misdeeds of the Papin sisters in the 1930s who committed hideous acts of violence against their employers. The writer, Jean Genet, turns this grisly tale into a frivolous melodrama about role-play and the theatricality of domestic service. The two maids take turns to dress up as their ‘mistress’ and to abuse and insult each other. At the same time, they secretly plot her murder. The script is often performed by men in drag but the director Annie Kershaw casts this production with women. And she locates the show in the correct period. Good.
The outstanding performer, Charlie Oscar, plays the mistress as a deliciously cruel and sexually magnetic vamp. Then she turns herself into a sad little serving-girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Great stuff. The set is decorated like a padded cell, probably as a gesture to the fate of Papin sisters who suffered from mental health problems. The abiding popularity of this play rests on its value as an allegory of Marxist revolution: the oppressed servants rise up and destroy their wicked exploiters. Its political relevance is less obvious now than in 1947, when it was written. The juice is running a little thin and its status as a classic may not endure. Catch it while you can.
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