
Owen McCafferty’s new play focuses on the negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement
A drama about the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement – 25 years ago this month – might sound a dry affair. But Owen McCafferty’s “searing” new play is anything but that, said Jane Coyle in The Irish Times. Agreement is a “compelling political thriller with echoes of Greek drama”, in which the playwright “peels away interlocking layers of compromise, dislike and distrust to reveal a fraught, painstaking journey towards an acceptable solution to a stubbornly intractable problem”. Featuring as characters all the main players – John Hume, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, George Mitchell, Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam – the play unfolds in a circular space, with a single round window to the sky, that becomes a “goldfish bowl of feverish political manoeuvring”.