Kyoto
Royal Shakespeare Company Swan Theatre
If you’ve wanted to attend an international conference then this production of Kyoto is probably the
closest you’re going to get. The Swan theatre’s ground floor is set up as a giant conference table and
if you’ve got a stalls seat and arrive when the auditorium opens you can get a delegate’s badge from
the ushers and sit in the spare seats round the conference table among the international representatives
and even chat to them.
The story of Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play focuses, a touch confusingly, on Stephen Kunken’s
Don Pearlman, an American wheeler dealer who acts as a quasi participant at the conference and as a
kind of narrator of the unfolding events, playing his role of trying to derail the conference. The
publicity for the play concerns the conference reaching agreement at the eleventh hour but oddly
doesn’t have anything about the main character, Pearlman, and exactly what he is up to.
The play has a threefold focus. The first is on the Kyoto conference about climate change and the
many other conferences leading up to it. The second is on Pearlman and his relationship with his wife
Shirley (Jenna Augen). And the third is political: how millions (even billions) of pounds are spent on
international ventures which in the end, even when some agreement had been reached, amount to very
little indeed. Self-interest of individuals and countries are in the end to the fore and the issue of
climate change fades. The depressing message seems to be that the point of such conferences is little
more than window dressing.
Miriam Buether’s set makes the rather dull, depressing material theatrical. Delegates come and go
from their seats throughout, moving past and through audience members. And directors Stephen
Daldry and Justin Martin bring their experience of film and audience expectations of variety to create
a theatrical event. There is a fancy dress party with elaborate costumes. There is domestic interest in
the rather sterile relationship between Don nd his wife and Shirley’s attempts to get her husband to
ring their son. There is an underplayed but insistent element of male chauvinism. There are caricatures
of John Prescott and Al Gore.
Of the international delegates Andrea Gatchalian’s Kiribati comes off best in a lovely performance
and Kwong Lee’s China is surprisingly sympathetically portrayed. Togo Igawa’s Japan brings flair
and energy to the proceedings and Nancy Crane’s USA brings plenty of foul-mouthed diplomacy to
bear. But the outstanding performance of that of Jorge Bosch as Raul Estrada-Oyuela as the aspiring
and then actual conference chairman who eschews all caricature and brings an engaging complexity to
the piece. His is the best and most fully developed character and he makes the most of it.
We went to the preview which, including the interval, lasted three hours. Bill and I agreed that it was
a bit too long to sustain interest and concentration. If, as I hope it will, it loses 30 minutes it will be
tighter. Some of the early conferences do little more than repeat what we have already witnessed and
Shirley’s ending monologue, well delivered though it was, went on a bit.
One word of warning. We had a glass of wine each and a packet of peanuts in the Dirty Duck
afterwards which cost us £24, similar to the extortionate RSC prices.
All in all it was a fascinating evening with adventurous staging, good direction and excellent acting
performances. For me it was a shame about the topic. I hadn’t seen anything like it before, though,
and in a week when I also saw the fascinating one night performance of King Lear by the Theatre
Studio of IDP’s UZHIC in Ukranian and Tread the Boards Company’s The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare Abridged at the Attic Theatre it was clear that with the return of The Attic, the
reopening of The Other Place and the breath of fresh air from the RSC’s new joint artictic directors,
there is no better place for professional theatre outside London than Stratford-upon-Avon.