From the late ’60s till 1998, when the Good Friday Settlement wound down hostilities between the Catholic nationalist Irish Republican Military and the U.Ok.-supported loyalist protestant militias, Northern Eire was with the battle often called the Troubles. One may learn and watch a lifetime of reporting on this topic and nonetheless not have a agency deal with on its nuances, contradictions, factions, info and figures of the combat for, and towards, Irish independence and reunification — a narrative going again centuries.
It’s actually effectively past the ability of any docudrama to take it in entire, and the power of FX’s “Say Nothing” — a nine-episode historic drama now streaming on Hulu — is that it doesn’t attempt to. Created by Joshua Zetumer, who adapts Patrick Radden Keefe‘s multiple award-winning 2018 nonfiction book, subtitled “A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” it focuses instead on a handful of characters, their activities and relationships.
The drama, which spans the years of the Troubles (and beyond) is framed by the Belfast Project, a series of off-the-record until after-death interviews conducted by Boston College between 2000 and 2006. “Say Nothing” re-creates only two, with IRA volunteer Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew young; Maxine Peake older) and commander Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle young; Tom Vaughan-Lawlor older), called “The Dark.” (Both have died; Price in 2013 and Hughes in 2008.)
As such, it takes place largely, and asymmetrically, within the world, and world view, of the IRA, focusing on Dolours and her younger sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) and senior officers Hughes and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan, young; Michael Colgan older), who would become a famous mainstream politician. A disclaimer at the end of each episode acknowledges Adams’ denial that he was ever a member of the IRA or concerned in political violence; it’s a declare “Say Nothing” in any other case freely dismisses.
After we meet them, the Worth sisters are working peacefully for equal rights, belittled by their father (Stuart Graham), a proud veteran of an earlier chapter of “the armed struggle” who “bled on the battlefield.”
Maxine Peake as older Dolours Worth in “Say Nothing.”
(Rob Youngston / FX)
“In a civilized society, what does violence get you?” Dolours asks, citing Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., when her father mocks sit-ins and marches. (“Weren’t they both assassinated?” asks Aunt Bridie, performed by Eileen Walsh, who misplaced her sight and fingers to a prematurely exploding bomb.) However the sisters are radicalized after being attacked within the 1969 Burntollet Bridge incident, when protesters calling for equal rights on a peaceable march from Belfast to Derry have been ambushed by a mob wielding stones, iron bars and sticks spiked with nails.
Threaded via “Say Nothing,” and loosely connecting the principal characters, is the story of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a mom of 10 who was dragged from her house in 1972 by the IRA and “disappeared.” The combat to search out her stays offers the sequence’ most shifting moments, nevertheless it’s Dolours who’s its dramatic key. Whereas Marian stays a soldier who received’t admit the warfare is over, Dolours, who would marry actor Stephen Rea, turns into extra considerate and regretful with time, and suffers for it.
Together with his Buddy Holly glasses, scruffy boho beard, floppy hair and turtleneck sweater, Adams — who is known as the Large Lad — is lazily charismatic, with the precociously paternal air of a cool, or seemingly cool, assistant professor — he calls Dolours, who in actual life was solely two years youthful, “child.” Hughes is a extra relaxed, social particular person, if finally extra hamstrung by ethical certainty. In comparison with the Worth sisters, their tales are comparatively undeveloped; as in ballet, the lads are there for lifts and catches.
There may be some violence onscreen, or simply offscreen, perpetrated by or towards the characters — you’re feeling it in both case. Jailed in England in 1973, after their half in a sequence of London automobile bombings, the sisters go on a starvation strike — they need to be moved to a ladies’s jail in Eire — and are force-fed, a course of proven with disturbing exactitude. However a lot of the motion takes place in odd rooms and pubs, usually dimly lighted as befits a milieu cloaked in secrecy and insularity. And the violence, most of the time, is psychological and infrequently self-inflicted.
Such a interval piece can usually really feel synthetic, even or particularly on a giant funds. However whether or not or not that is How It Was, it’s straightforward sufficient to simply accept that it’s How It May Have Been; the manufacturing and set items really feel proper, the dialogue is extra speech than speeches. On the identical time, as a result of it takes place over a few years, with a lot elided, the sequence can typically really feel summary, particularly when it strikes away from Dolours — a historical past lesson in bits and items, relatively than dwelling historical past. There are highly effective moments, to make certain, surrounding the human drama, however, although ethical questions are duly thought-about, the political drama registers much less intensely — aside from all of it seeming greater than a little bit mad.
As most of us received’t regard the IRA as a military at warfare, because it styled itself, however a terrorist group — as was, actually, its reverse quantity, the Ulster Protection Assn. — our hope might be that the sisters survive the IRA as a lot as their smuggling expeditions, financial institution robberies and jail phrases. Hughes tells the Belfast Undertaking interviewer (Seamus O’Hara), “Dolours could have been anything she wanted; she could have been in New York, she could have been in Paris,” and one can’t assist however want she have been.