In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.
In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.
It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.
“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.
The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.
“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”
In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.
With the American special envoy George Mitchell (Richard Croxford), the former Senator, as a kind of interloper-facilitator, they are quite likable, mostly, despite Blair (Martin Hutson) being besotted with his smiley self, and the men’s sexist sidelining of Mowlam. Her lack of vanity is in stark contrast to the obstructive male egotism on display. Radiation treatments have made her hair fall out, but when her wig gets too hot, she takes it off. Puts her stocking feet up on her desk, too.
The most maddeningly intransigent negotiator is the pinstriped David Trimble (Ruairi Conaghan), soon to become first minister of Northern Ireland. He is alienating in his stubbornness, yet he and Hume will share that year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
In honoring the healing accord reached in Belfast, the Nobel Committee said it hoped “that the foundations which have now been laid will not only lead to lasting peace in Northern Ireland, but also serve to inspire peaceful solutions to other religious, ethnic and national conflicts around the world.”
That, of course, is why “Agreement,” with its universal title, is a meditation for this moment: because peacemaking is a human emergency, very much ongoing.
The drama is similarly timeless over at Irish Repertory Theater, where Ciaran O’Reilly has staged a stellar, stinging revival of Brian Friel’s 1964 comedy, “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” Part of the company’s seasonlong Friel Project, it is the work of a director who understands the play in his very bones.
O’Reilly directed it in 2005, acted in it in 1990, and shares some biography with Gar, its young protagonist, who is preparing to leave his home in fictional, claustrophobically small Ballybeg, County Donegal, for the United States. O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director, was 19 when he quit his Irish hometown.
Set on the eve of Gar’s departure, “Philadelphia” is both very funny and liable to take a sharp little dagger to your heart as it ponders the guts it takes to leave home for another country, and the guts it takes to forge a future where you’ve always been. At its center is an impeccable double act: David McElwee as the timid, external Gar and A.J. Shively as the garrulous, unconstrained Gar inside his head.
At 25, Gar wants nothing more desperately than for his taciturn, widowed father (O’Reilly) to love him in a way he can at least detect, but the gulf between them, even at the same dinner table, might as well be an ocean wide.
The play’s whipsaw emotional balance is complex, delicate, subtle. This superb production delineates it all.
The post In Belfast and Ballybeg, Forging a Bolder Future appeared first on New York Times.