Kyoto @sohoplace: A Gripping Political Thriller

Kyoto I @sohoplace London | 3rd May 2025

If I told you you were going to see a play, Kyoto, that’s nearly three hours long and about a series of climate conferences where people are arguing over words, paragraphs, full stops, and punctuation, I am sure you would say I need to stay at home and check my grouting!

Kyoto is a political thriller created by the team that gave us The Jungle at the Playhouse a few years ago, and it comes to us courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company after a well-received run at Stratford-upon-Avon.

However, in the same way the film Conclave makes the election of a pope an absolutely gripping thriller, Kyoto performs a similar feat and is one of the most thrilling pieces of theatre I have seen in a long while.

It is the kind of theatre I love. As with the Lehman Trilogy, it deals with real events and real issues, stimulating, educating, and entertaining, and it does that in spades. Also, it makes the best use of the beautiful new venue @Soho Place, which is in the round with not a bad seat in the house.

At the centre is the enormous oval conference table where some lucky members of the audience sit. The play is immersive to the extent that we are all at the conference, and you are given a tag when you go in, identifying which country you are representing.

But the genius stroke is putting the American oil lobbyist Don Perlman, brilliantly played by Stephen Conkin, as our narrator and taking us through this story. He is the man employed by the oil companies to scupper all this. He is a charismatic, funny character, and you have to keep reminding yourself that we’re not supposed to like him! Proving that the devil has all the best lines, he’s a mixture of Richard III and Salieri from Amadeus.

It has a large cast who multi-role and features familiar characters such as John Prescott and Angela Merkel—they are portrayed in broad strokes, with Prescott verging on caricature—but this does not diminish the piece.

He takes us through this whole complex ten-year journey leading up to this conference, and it becomes nail-biting to find out if they actually reach an agreement.

It makes for one of the most stunning, clever, exciting, funny, and moving pieces of theatre.

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