Agreement review: ‘compelling political thriller’ with a first-rate cast

Owen McCafferty’s new play focuses on the negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement

Packy Lee as Gerry Adams and Dan Gordon as John Hume in Agreement
Packy Lee as Gerry Adams and Dan Gordon as John Hume in Agreement
(Image credit: Carrie Davenport)

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”.

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