Agreement
Gate Theatre
★★★★★
Owen McCafferty’s Agreement opened at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2023 to jubilant notices, including a five-star rave by Jane Coyle in The Irish Times. Following hot on the heels of a New York transfer, the play returns triumphantly to Ireland for Dublin Theatre Festival. Happily, the rating remains the same.
No show that spends significant time breaking down the intricacies of the interdependent sections of the multiparty agreement signed in Belfast on April 10th, 1998, has the right to be as much fun as this dramatisation of the nervy final days of Good Friday negotiations.
The clock is ticking as the soi-disant saviour Tony Blair (Martin Hutson) swoops in on a smarm offensive. It doesn’t take long for the tense stand-offs and shouty exchanges to wipe the permagrin off the face of the British prime minister.
In the red, white and blue corner we find David Trimble (Ruairi Conaghan), the Ulster Unionist Party leader, as embattled as he is intransigent, horrified by the ideas of Southern interference, co-operation with Irish republicans or any change to the status quo. He refuses to speak to Gerry Adams (Aaron McCusker) of Sinn Féin, much less give in to the demand for the release of all political prisoners within a year.
The warring parties are presided over by the sage US senator George Mitchell (Sean Kearns) and the wily tea lady and British secretary of state for Northern Ireland Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine).
A cheerleading, indefatigable John Hume (Dan Gordon) pushes on for a “new dawn”, a hope that may enrage those who have been keeping up with events at Stormont over the past two decades.
Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), returning from his mother’s funeral, comes to the table with constitutional amendments. The taoiseach shares the play’s most emotionally impactful scene with Mowlam.
Under Charlotte Westenra’s high-octane direction and Dylan Quinn’s dynamic choreography, wheeled desks whizz around the stage between electrifying scenes. The video designer Eoin Robinson finds innovative things to do with a sky window and re-created historical imagery.
Absent parties, including Ian Paisley snr, of the Democratic Unionists, and loyalist paramilitaries, are cleverly conjured, the former in witty news broadcasts (from Jonathan Blake and Ann-Marie Foster), the latter in succinct meeting minutes enacted by Adams.
Mary Tumelty’s lighting design and Conleth Hill’s vocals recast Bill Clinton, the US president, as an entity pitched somewhere between saint and contemporaneous sex hotline.
McCafferty, a playwright who can pick out familiar and fond foibles in the grimmest scenario – he was also responsible for Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, 1912), a piece of verbatim theatre – continually and commendably cuts through the seriousness of the situation to find levity in personal stakes and political bluster.
His writing flirts with preconceptions: immutable unionists, paternalistic Brits and scaldy republicans. Fans of the TV series The Thick of It and Succession will find plenty to love.
It’s tricky for actors to take on historical figures, especially these recognisable faces from a quarter of a century ago. The ensemble eschews prosthetics and precision and focuses, instead, on the essence of each character. Their aim proves true.
Continues at the Gate, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 27th
