Analysis: there has been a rich seam of political and documentary theatre in Ireland in the post-Celtic Tiger era
"Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed." So says the character of George Mitchell, US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, at the opening of Owen McCafferty's new play, Agreement. Produced by Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, the play brings audiences inside the stresses, tensions, and emotions of negotiations as time ticks down to the final hours of talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.
In staging these pivotal but private moments, how does political theatre fare on the stage? While politics is made of drama, does it make for good theatre?
25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, we meet the cast of Mitchell, John Hume, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, Gerry Adams, David Trimble and Mo Mowlam, or at least, a version of them, where the setting is an uncertain as the outcome of the talks. While agreement is desired, we are reminded early on that this is 'Northern Ireland, the European Union, a shared space, a rock that belongs to no one’, all at once. How can anything be agreed upon?
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, interview with Patrick O'Kane who plays David Trimble in Agreement
Political theatre as a format can be complex. An audience generally knows the outcome in advance. We’ve already witnessed it. The people, events, decisions, and fall-outs have been part of our news cycles and history books. What can we learn from the staging the political past in the present? The answer to that question may lie less in what we can learn, but rather in what we can experience, or imagine, of those key moments in our (recent) pasts, and which continue to shape our society today.
Politics fails when it is detached from reason, logic, and transparency. In those moments it is often described as having descended into theatre, circus, or farce. The Bristol-based artist Banksy, summed this up in his 2009 largescale painting entitled Devolved Parliament, depicting the British House of Commons populated entirely by chimpanzees. Theatre that is solely about a political viewpoint can also risk being dismissed as propaganda. But positioning politics within the drama and as theatre, be it through character or through verbatim and documentary form, can allow audiences to gain new insights, understanding, and empathy for the decision-makers as well as for the decisions made during tense political moments of crisis.
There has been a rich seam of political/documentary theatre in Ireland in the post-Celtic Tiger era. Colin Murphy, author of works like Guaranteed! (produced by Fishamble in 2013) depicted the behind-the-scenes-back-of-an-envelope style of politics and financial governance that resulted in Ireland's experience of the global banking collapse and financial ruin that followed. The news of the so-called 'Anglo Tapes' leak, with recordings of Anglo-Irish bank officials, broke on the same week the play opened. No amount of money (ironically, given the subject matter) could buy publicity like that for the play.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena in 2013, playwright Colin Murphy discusses his play Guaranteed!
Journalist Mary Raftery created No Escape, which used testimony from the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (the Ryan Report), and which was staged in 2010 at the Abbey Theatre. Home: Part 1 was a response to the report on Mother and Baby Homes, focusing on the testimonies of survivors, broadcast on Youtube from the Abbey Theatre on St. Patrick’s Day 2021. Anu Productions, Smashing Times, Kabosh Theatre and others have explored the dramatic qualities and human stories from historical sources and make the past an immersive and visceral experience for theatre audiences.
Central to all of these plays is the politics of evidence. The archives, records, and testimony of the political moment is paramount. Who was involved? What was said? Who negotiated with who? This centres the action on moments the public usually cannot know, and on documents as evidence of such talks, all of which is at the heart of Agreement: "Mitchell hands out more documents. This is it – the agreement – two years in the making….".
Agreement is also an effectively subtle play title. It is not about THE Agreement, but rather that long and arduous act of reaching agreement, the drama of give and take, the listening as well as the talking, that makes change happen (or not). This is not a documentary. It is a powerful piece of theatre filled with dialogue and compromise, heightened in the hope of reaching a resolution – or worse, the reality of not reaching one.
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From RTÉ's Your Politics podcast, Áine Lawlor talks to Emma DeSouza, Bríd Rodgers, Monica McWilliams and Liz O'Donnell about the role of women in the Good Friday Agreement talks and misogny at the negotiation table
Charlotte Westenra's direction and management of the characters, each fighting for and trapped by their individual perspectives, is fascinating to watch unfold. Costuming too plays a central role on stage, (designed by Conor Murphy) as it also does in the real political chamber. The stage is filled with men in suits (Trimble in his pin stripes, Ahern is his black suit mourning the death of his mother) but they and all others, from Blair to Adams, continually adjust their cuffs or button and unbutton their jackets as they sit or leave the negotiating table – all a power-play of the male political animal.
On the other hand, Mowlam suffers from often being in the background, as she is within the wider historical narrative today. Barefooted and weary, she asks "who listens to tea ladies", referencing her belittled role in comparison to the men and egos at play, many, such as Rufus Wright's brilliantly satirical send-up of Tony Blair, are jostling and preening for soundbites in the media and the history books.
David Trimble (Patrick O'Kane) and Gerry Adams (Packy Lee) are the protagonists with the most to lose, each taking no backward step on their demands: Trimble and decommissioning of weapons ("We don’t all have arms dumps hidden all over the country"), Adams and the timeframe of release of Republican prisoners ("No one wants to talk about prisoners.") with Ahern (Ronan Leahy) focusing on North-South relations and governance ("We need to negotiate. There are no other options left.")
As the minutiae of strands 1,2, and 3 of the agreement are hammered out, the realisation that an acceptable agreement is close is slowly revealed to the audience. "Hume: We’re too far down the road – whoever walks away now will be blamed for the failure of a peace process."
25 years on, our news cycle has been filled with a new vocabulary of (dis)agreement – backstops, hard borders, protocols, and frameworks are just some of those terms to dominate Anglo-Irish political dialogue of late. The cycle of political action will continue to create new dramas. Theatre such as Agreement might just help us understand the present as well as the past, and with more clarity and hope for the future.
Agreement runs at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, until April 22nd, as part of the Imagine! Belfast Festival.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
