UK playwrights ‘the two Joes’ turn climate crisis into drama of hope

By Barbara Lewis

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England (Reuters) – The British playwrights known affectionately as “the two Joes,” whose drama extracts hope from vexed political issues, have begun researching a sequel to “Kyoto” that runs at the Royal Shakespeare Company until Saturday.

Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy earned acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic with the sell-out “The Jungle”, which premiered in 2017 and drew on their experience of running a theatre in the Jungle refugee camp in Calais, France.

Their Good Chance company also collaborated on “The Walk”, a journey of thousands of miles by puppet “Little Amal”, representing a Syrian refugee, that included an appearance at the 2021 U.N. climate talks.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol appealed to them as “a parable of agreement”.

“We began with a feeling of great despair at a habit of disagreement,” Joe Murphy told Reuters, referring to divisions in society.

“We have got to reclaim the joy of consensus,” said Joe Robertson.

“Kyoto”, the first instalment of their “Carbon Cycle” of plays, acknowledges that the protocol agreed in Japan on the first binding targets to curb emissions was only a moment.

The sequel will be based on the Copenhagen U.N. talks, notorious for their failure to reach a binding deal. They still led to future progress, including theatres’ efforts to minimise emissions.

The RSC is using the latest version of the Theatre Green Book, a manual on eliminating waste.

It also accompanied “Kyoto” with its own “Kyoto Conference” in Stratford-upon-Avon, central England. Speakers included U.S. actor Stephen Kunken, who plays the Washington lawyer Don Pearlman, employed by the oil lobby to sabotage any agreement.

In real life, like the two Joes, Kunken hailed theatre’s power to “ferret out” the shared humanity that makes us laugh or cry in unison.

“There’s something that happens when you work on a play, you come to agree,” he said. “The theatre is the place to find agreement.”

(Reporting by Barbara Lewis; additional reporting by Sarah Mills; Editing by Bernadette Baum)