All agreed – Frank McNally on the surprise success of a play about the Good Friday Agreement

Agreement is a funny and moving drama

Andrea Irvine as Mo Mowlam in the Gate Theatre’s production of  Agreement by Owen McCafferty. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh
Andrea Irvine as Mo Mowlam in the Gate Theatre’s production of Agreement by Owen McCafferty. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

The merits of the work itself aside, it must mark a piece of theatrical history that somebody has produced a successful stage play with the title “Agreement”. This would seem to violate at least one basic rule of drama. All right, Belfast’s Lyric Theatre probably didn’t need to issue a plot spoiler alert when the play – concerning as it does the last days of the Stormont peace talks in 1998 – opened there last year, amid much celebration of the resulting document’s 25th anniversary.

But when it transferred to New York in spring, surely some old Broadway hands must have suggested changing the title to something more suggestive of tension. “Disagreement”, perhaps?

I’m reminded of the challenge Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman faced when trying to turn All The President’s Men into a movie script, just after President Nixon had been forced to resign.

Everyone knew how the story ended. So after wrestling with the dramatic deficit for weeks, Goldwyn “threw out” the second half of the source book by Woodward and Bernstein: the part that detailed their slow but steady progress to triumph.

READ MORE

Instead, he made the journalists’ biggest mistake – the moment when they seemed to have collapsed their whole investigation – the film’s climax. Mind you, in All The President’s Men, Goldwyn also had a slightly more cryptic title on his side.

In writing Agreement, by contrast, Owen McCafferty didn’t need to perform any drastic surgery on the story. There was no steady march to triumph in 1998.

Nothing was agreed until everything was agreed, as the talks’ ground-rules put it. And the odds still seemed to be heavily in favour of nothing right up until everything emerged as the surprise winner. Well into Good Friday, collapse remained possible.

Even so, and adding to his revolutionary title, it must also be a ground-breaking feat that McCafferty somehow turned all those days of talking, threatening, and exchanging of position papers into 100 minutes of funny and moving drama.

***

The play has added resonance for those of us who were in Stormont that final Easter night, if only while freezing our butts off in the press marquee outside. Indeed, watching it at the Gate Theatre on Wednesday, I felt a deep compunction to share the memories it evoked with the friend alongside me. “That was extraordinary,” I whispered of the poignant scenes portraying Bertie Ahern’s return to the negotiations direct from his mother’s funeral in Dublin.

“I was at that too,” I whispered again later, when the play featured (as noises offstage) the moment Ian Paisley stormed the talks and held a press conference in a Portakabin, only to be heckled by his former admirers in the loyalist fringe groups.

Then there was the production’s insistence on including occasional weather updates in the script. This seemed a puzzling distraction at first until I remembered a strangely climactic event that happened in the early hours of that Good Friday. “It snowed!” I whispered to my friend, sharing a renewed sense of wonder at the memory. But somehow by then I could also sense that she was tiring of my theatrical asides (it may have been the way she told me to shut up).

So I stopped sharing after that. Meanwhile, sure enough – Meteorological Metaphor Spoiler Alert – the snow played a climactic part in the play too: conditions outside the talks venue mirrored by the blizzard of position papers that carpet the stage by the end.

***

Snow was also a feature in what may be the best film ever made about Belfast. Indeed, there are those who think that Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) is its director’s true masterpiece, surpassing even The Third Man.

A film noir, Odd Man Out traces the final hours of a doomed IRA member Johnny McQueen (James Mason), after he is wounded in a botched robbery. But it becomes a film blanc near the end when the rain turns into snow, falling on McQueen’s head and – in one shot – on the statue of a mourning angel.

Reed may have been thinking of the famous closing passage of Joyce’s The Dead, where snow is general all over Ireland. And that must also have been in the minds of some in Stormont in the early hours of Good Friday 1998.

Not that the snow was general then, or even locally heavy. It was only a sprinkling, really. Even so, in its timing, it looked like a celestial blessing on the events happening inside the building.

I don’t remember my soul swooning, although I was slightly weak from hunger by 4am. But it did also feel like an act of closure, Joycean-style, as we watched the snow falling faintly through East Belfast and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and thousands of prematurely dead.