Key sections of the RSC’s latest world premiere feature characters arguing over whether a comma should be used instead of a full stop and if the sentence should then be enclosed within square brackets.
Kyoto by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, which dramatises the negotiation of the first international treaty on tackling climate change, in Japan in 1997, makes such verbal pedantry tense and gripping. It joins a subset of plays about high-stakes textual hesitation: Oslo by JT Rogers, which recreated the Israel-Palestine peace accord of the 1990s; David Edgar’s Written on the Heart, about the negotiations over the King James Bible; and Owen McCafferty’s Agreement, a dramatisation of the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland.
