Kyoto review: Do we need to know this character is Jewish?

The play is written by Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy (affectionately known as “the Joes”), co-founders of Good Chance, a theatre company forged in the notorious Calais migrant camp known as the Jungle, which was also the title of the duo’s excellent first full-length play.

Like that work this one is also directed by Stephen Daldry (The Crown) and Justin Martin. All this is necessary to know because, more than anyone I can think of, this bunch have cut through the tropes and stereotypes of migrant crisis news stories to reveal the humanity that exists behind often lurid headlines. Yet their latest work could be said to perpetuate a trope rather than dismantle it for it centres on a Jew being behind a world-harming conspiracy.

Set in the 1990s, when scientists were still trying to convince anyone who would listen that man-made emissions were warming the globe, the play blows the lid on the vested interests who conspired to prevent action being taken to address climate change. These sinister dark forces are represented by people in long overcoats who appear out of the shadows. Collectively known as the Seven Sisters they run the world’s biggest oil companies. And to disrupt attempts to bring their production to heel they employ this play’s narrator Don Pearlman, a real-life American lawyer who we learn served under Ronald Reagan at the Department of Energy.

As played by the American actor Stephen Kunken, Pearlman is a quick-witted, wise-cracking details man. According to this play he made it his business to know every rule and clause that governed meetings held by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) a knowledge which he deploys with great skill to run the climate meetings into the ground.

He is also Jewish, a thing first established when he refers to the Tanach and then again with a speech that explains his motivation for sabotaging the climate change meetings. “I’m a Lithuanian Jew,” he says. “My parents found freedom in America. When the world was killing us, America kept us safe,” he says, seemingly unaware that he is in a play that arguably perpetuates the very image of the Jew that was used was to justify killing them and which caused his parents to flee Europe.

It is a speech that bears little scrutiny. It makes the half-baked point that by stopping climate change action Pearlman is defending the freedoms that protected him and his family. Really? Much of the Republican Party has apparently managed climate change denial without being Jewish. Why is it necessary for Pearlman?

Did, in the course of their research, the writers find that this was the real-life Pearlman’s opinion? If so, might it have been better not to deploy it as this character’s defining motivation for fear of perpetuating the image of the Jew being central to a world-harming conspiracy? If not, that is a whole other can of worms.

No one involved in creating this otherwise gripping play appears to have asked this question: not the Joes, nor their directors, nor Daniel Evans or Tamara Harvey the new artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, nor even the play’s charismatic star Kunken who is Jewish.

Being an American he may be less sensitive to European anxieties about the way Jews are depicted in the wider culture.

But his apparent surprise at receiving a few panto-like boos at the curtain call might make him wonder if the unpopularity of his character was deepened by the play’s focus on his heritage.​