“What are you giving up?” This question, posed by Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the former Irish taoiseach, is central to Owen McCafferty’s dramatisation of the final four days of negotiation that led to the pivotal Good Friday Agreement. Twenty-five years later, the compromises made at the end of a long, tortuous peace process are compellingly conveyed.
For the generation born since 1998, this is a history play. McCafferty and director Charlotte Westenra have made it accessible by distilling multiple perspectives into seven characters, and placing these key political players under maximum pressure in a single space.
Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), secretary of state for Northern Ireland, is our guide to crucial points of argument, also with direct address to the audience from nationalist John Hume (Dan Gordon) and the Ulster Unionist party’s David Trimble (Patrick O’Kane) at moments of high tension. While the US mediator George Mitchell (Richard Croxford) seems less actively involved, he has assistance from a higher power in the disembodied form of Bill Clinton – a light projection attached to a voice on the phone.
Conor Murphy’s set and Kate Marlais’s sound design convey the scrutiny of the outside world and global media via an oval window showing projections of televised speeches, radio studio clocks or a stormy Belfast sky through which Tony Blair’s helicopter arrives with comic fanfare. “The Messiah,” grumbles Mowlam, feeling sidelined by the arrival of her prime minister (Rufus Wright). Offering tea to Gerry Adams (Packy Lee) and Trimble, she cajoles each side, finally losing her temper with Ahern. In an emotionally charged scene, her illness and Ahern’s grief for his mother’s death allow them to admit vulnerability.
In this fictionalised rather than verbatim version of events, McCafferty and Westenra can – and do – take dramatic latitude. As the superb cast whisk their desks around the stage or twirl Blair through the air in one droll fantasy sequence, these lighter interludes offset late-night hours of seemingly intractable arguments. They offer a moment to pause and appreciate just how remarkable it was that this historic turning point was reached; the courage it took, as Hume insisted, to “keep moving forward”.
At the Lyric theatre, Belfast, until 22 April
