Christiane Amanpour is first and foremost an international affairs correspondent, but for Friday’s PBS edition of Amanpour & Co., she interviewed playwright Joe Murphy and actor Stephen Kunken at the Soho Place theatre in London, where the climate change message play Kyoto, cowritten by Murphy and starring Kunken, is being performed.
Amanpour, who surely considers herself an intellectual, sounded like any other knee-jerk liberal when she again lauded the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale (also featuring Kunken), the source for all the red cloak-white bonnet uniform of hundreds of unimaginative feminist protests in the Trump era.
She called climate change “the existential crisis of our time.” There was praise for environmentalist and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who signed the Paris Climate Accords in 2016 as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.
Murphy: The temptation is to feel exactly that kind of despair. And I won't pretend I have not felt that at times, but I think it’s also important to remember that we would exist in a worse world if Kyoto had not happened. It feels like a slight cliche at the moment to say multilateralism is dead. Senator John Kerry was here the other day.
Amanpour: He’s still fighting the good fight.
Amanpour bluntly pushed simplistic U.S. partisan politics, taking advantage of actor Kunken's presence to harp on The Handmaid's Tale show.
Amanpour: ….This play might not have been a protest play had Kamala Harris won. The Jungle or the Handmaid's Tale which you [Kunken] were in might not have been so incredibly difficult to bear had Hillary Clinton not lost when you are playing them and Trump had won with all of his misogyny and all the rest of it. The Jungle, which you [Murphy] did about refugees was also a protest play as to how the world was dealing with the most vulnerable amongst us.
After a brief dip into the ostensible subject of Kyoto -- climate change talks -- Amanpour steered the talk back to The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel, and tied it to anti-Trump politics, even harking back to Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. (Seriously, liberals, read another book, or in this case, watch another show.
Amanpour: ….Let's just go back to Handmaid's Tale. Because again it’s a real issue, the rights of women. And you can see with the new quote unquote manosphere, with the bros with all these people from Mark Zuckerberg and of course Donald Trump. I mean it’s what Margaret Atwood foretold. Tell me what it's like to play that when you thought maybe Hillary was going to win and then when she didn't and all of that progress was rolled back and is now being rolled back, a lot of it.
Actor Kunken provided lefty handwringing.
Kunken: Well, I had committed to do that part right before the election. And thought, and I think when I arrived we all believed that that was, we were making another cautionary tale and we arrived on the ground and it was a whole different reality. It’s hard. It's invigorating to work on those things.
It’s interesting though, because we went through an entire cycle in the six years we made the show. We had the moment of protest. And then we came back out and we thought, "Wow, something was achieved here, these voices were heard." We saw those red outfits crimson clothes appear outside of Congress, and we were making an effect. And then the show has just wrapped and we’re in a different world again. And I think one of the pieces of solace that we can take in this moment is that time is long. You hit a certain age I think where you look at the cycles. And things will change. There is hope….
