Patrick O’Kane on playing David Trimble: ‘It’s not my job to judge my character. Quite the opposite’

On April 10th, 1998, the Belfast Agreement was signed. That day this writer was at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, interviewing the Belfast actor Lalor Roddy for this newspaper. He was a member of the all-Irish cast of Shadows, John Crowley’s collective staging of WB Yeats’s play Purgatory and JM Synge’s Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen.

Our conversation was constantly interrupted by theatre staff and fellow actors congratulating us on the big event of the day. Lalor tempered their enthusiasm with characteristic Northern cynicism: “Ah, well, we’ll wait and see.”

And, indeed, here we are again, 25 years on, still waiting, still seeing, as another protracted tangle of political negotiations unfolds, this time around the Windsor Framework and the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol.

Against this background, Belfast’s Lyric Theatre is about to open Agreement, a new play by Owen McCafferty. It’s his first since Fire Below, six years ago. In the intervening time he has turned his attention to writing screenplays, so his return to the stage is welcome. The play was commissioned by MGC, or the Michael Grandage Company, in London, which produces high-quality work for stage and screen, nationally and internationally.

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The Lyric’s executive producer, Jimmy Fay, a long-time associate of McCafferty, was keen for the theatre to mark the 25th anniversary. He initially thought about restaging Quietly, the writer’s hard-hitting examination of violence and forgiveness, which Fay directed in 2012. Then he discovered that Grandage’s company had already commissioned a new play about the agreement.

“MGC instigated it, but they were happy for it to be a Lyric production,” says Fay. “There was no mention of a Belfast production until we got involved, but I felt it was important it should happen here, for obvious reasons. If it tours to London or the States, MGC will help and coproduce.

“The play is pure McCafferty. His humour, his style, his immense artistry pulsate from it. It’s a very accessible and proactive take on an extremely complex subject. He deals with the undertow of violence, dread, anger, but never takes one side. He examines, in a very compelling way, two opposing viewpoints and how they came together in a crucial agreement.”

One of the big players involved in the negotiations was David Trimble, the late Ulster Unionist Party leader and subsequent joint Nobel Peace Prize winner (with the late SDLP leader John Hume). Among the director Charlotte Westenra’s highly experienced, largely Northern Irish cast, Trimble will be played by Patrick O’Kane, Hume by Dan Gordon, Gerry Adams by Packy Lee, Northern Ireland secretary of state Mo Mowlam by Andrea Irvine and the US senator George Mitchell by Richard Croxford.

O’Kane, whose pivotal performance in Quietly picked up the Stage’s best-actor award in 2012, recently came out of the critically acclaimed West End premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. His powerful portrayal of the racist, abusive farmer Bob Ewell – alongside Rafe Spall as the lawyer Atticus Finch – sent shivers of revulsion into the audience, night after night.

“I do evil well,” he says, his intense, faintly menacing facial expression belying the thoughtful, amusing and unfailingly courteous man he is in person. “Every actor always wants to take part in these big events. It was a timely production, given what was happening in the US and the UK. The book was written in Alabama in the 1930s, but during the run a young black man died in police custody in London. It had real resonance to the here and now. The theatre was packed every night, and there were waves of emotion coming at us from the audience.”

O’Kane and McCafferty have known each other since they were young, growing up in the same area of south Belfast, playing for the same Gaelic football team and fanatically supporting Manchester United. Then they set off on different career paths, and O’Kane made a permanent move to England.

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“We bumped into each other again about eight years later, when I was in Observe the Sons of Ulster [Marching towards the Somme] at the Lyric,” says O’Kane. “We got chatting about what we were doing. I said, ‘I’m an actor now,’ and he said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, because I write plays now.’ And on we went.

“A few years later Owen was writer-in-residence at the National Theatre Studio in London, and I was doing Gary Mitchell’s Trust there. He invited me to take part in a rehearsed reading of a fantastic, still unproduced play called Tonto’s Way, which showed what a good writer he was. We got on really well, and that was the start of our long working relationship.”

Over the years O’Kane has played a wide variety of significant stage – as well as screen – roles, including Macbeth for the RSC, Christy Mahon for the National Theatre, John Proctor (in The Crucible) at the Lyric, Hamlet at the Abbey and the Lyric, and Faustus at the Manchester Royal Exchange, but time and again he returns to the plays of McCafferty.

Conversation drifts back to another dramatised historic event, written by McCafferty and directed by Westenra, a political-theatre specialist. O’Kane played the sleek, ruthless English businessman and shipping magnate J Bruce Ismay in Titanic: Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, 1912, which used dialogue taken from survivors’ stories, news reports and witness accounts of the sinking of the White Star Line vessel. It was staged at the Mac in Belfast in 2012 for the official opening of the building.

Trimble really put himself out there, almost becoming persona non grata in his own constituency. There was great self-sacrifice on his part

—  Patrick O'Kane

Are there parallels between Titanic and Agreement? He takes a few moments to reply. “Well, yes – and no. Titanic was a verbatim piece, and Agreement is absolutely not. It’s based on real events and real people, but I can’t stress enough that it is a work of Owen’s imagination.”

“The focus here is on the Good Friday agreement and events leading up to it, but it is a kind of what-might-have-happened account, behind the cameras and behind the public theatre. The way the play is shaped and structured, all the characters are emblematic. Mo Mowlam represents the British government voice; Adams and Hume are the respective voices of republicans and nationalists; the unionist voice is Trimble’s, whom Owen has imagined as a composite character.

“He has taken the circumstances and time frame and crafted a piece of fiction which, at its heart, is a consideration of what it takes to reach agreement – the compromises, the sacrifices, the generosity of spirit, the things that stretched people to their absolute limits.”

It is generally acknowledged that Trimble was a complex, intensely private man not given to grand gestures or easy humour. In researching the role, in getting under his skin and inside his head, did O’Kane discover unexpected insights into the politician’s mindset?

“It’s not my job to judge my character,” he says. “Quite the opposite. It’s my job to defend him, to present his perspective as honestly as I can, to serve Owen’s script. In my preparation I was struck by the responses of Mitchell and Tony Blair’s representative Jonathan Powell – and Bertie Ahern – to Trimble and how impressed they were by his leadership.

I recently heard on the radio someone commenting that it’s time for the politicians to get their big-boy pants on. All those players who negotiated the Good Friday agreement absolutely got their big-boy pants on

“What I hadn’t appreciated was the amount of pressure he was under from within the unionists’ political and social community, how he really put himself out there, almost becoming persona non grata in his own constituency. There was great self-sacrifice on his part and, indeed, on John Hume and Seamus Mallon’s part, because, within five years of the agreement, both those parties were effectively wiped out.

“Trimble was reported to have said, from the beginning, that he wanted an agreement. While it might have been assumed that he’d been dragged kicking and screaming to the finishing line, it was useful for me to know that he was a pragmatist. Despite his deeply held beliefs, convictions and political instincts, he knew he had to move on from them. It was really interesting to go on that journey with him.”

O’Kane acknowledges an uncanny sense of serendipity that, as we look towards the opening of a new drama about political negotiation, Northern Ireland finds itself caught up in the maelstrom of the protocol manoeuvrings.

“It’s almost a mirror image of what was going on 25 years ago. I recently heard on the radio someone commenting that it’s time for the politicians to get their big-boy pants on. All those players who negotiated the Good Friday agreement absolutely got their big-boy pants on. Despite their intellectual, their moral, their political interests, they took part in an act of existential daring. They changed what they deeply believed and felt in their hearts, and agreed to move forward together.”

Herein lies the nub of the drama – and, in Fay’s view, there’s no better writer around to reimagine it. “Owen is a pure theatrical animal, who can say more in a beat or a tiny phrase than many writers can in reams of dialogue,” he says. “His dialogue is so rich, so deep. When you get a dynamic cast like we have here, ping-ponging Owen’s dialogue across the stage like explosive missives, it’s thrilling.

Agreement opens at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, today and runs until Saturday, April 22nd