From the late ’60s until 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement wound down hostilities between the Catholic nationalist Irish Republican Army and the U.K.-supported loyalist protestant militias, Northern Ireland was afflicted with the conflict known as the Troubles. One could read and watch a lifetime of reporting on this subject and still not have a firm handle on its nuances, contradictions, factions, facts and figures of the fight for, and against, Irish independence and reunification — a story going back centuries.
It’s certainly well beyond the power of any docudrama to take it in whole, and the strength of FX’s “Say Nothing” — a nine-episode historical drama now streaming on Hulu — is that it doesn’t try 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 involved in political violence; it’s a claim “Say Nothing” otherwise freely dismisses.
When we meet them, the Price 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.”
“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, played by Eileen Walsh; Bridie lost her sight and hands to a prematurely exploding bomb.) But the sisters are radicalized after being attacked in the 1969 Burntollet Bridge incident, when protesters calling for equal rights on a peaceful march from Belfast to Derry were ambushed by a mob wielding stones, iron bars and sticks spiked with nails.
Threaded through “Say Nothing,” and loosely connecting the principal characters, is the story of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a mother of 10 who was dragged from her apartment in 1972 by the IRA and “disappeared.” The fight to find her remains provides the series’ most moving moments, but it’s Dolours who is its dramatic key. Whereas Marian remains a soldier who won’t admit the war is over, Dolours, who would marry actor Stephen Rea, becomes more thoughtful and regretful with time, and suffers for it.
With his Buddy Holly glasses, scruffy boho beard, floppy hair and turtleneck sweater, Adams — who is called the Big Lad — is lazily charismatic, with the precociously paternal air of a cool, or seemingly cool, assistant professor — he calls Dolours, who in real life was only two years younger, “child.” Hughes is a more relaxed, social person, if ultimately more hamstrung by moral certainty. Compared to the Price sisters, their stories are comparatively undeveloped; as in ballet, the men are there for lifts and catches.
There is some violence onscreen, or just offscreen, perpetrated by or against the characters — you feel it in either case. Jailed in England in 1973, after their part in a series of London car bombings, the sisters go on a hunger strike — they want to be moved to a women’s prison in Ireland — and are force-fed, a process shown with disturbing exactitude. But much of the action takes place in ordinary rooms and pubs, often dimly lighted as befits a milieu cloaked in secrecy and insularity. And the violence, more often than not, is psychological and often self-inflicted.
This type of period piece can often feel artificial, even or especially on a big budget. But whether or not this is How It Was, it’s easy enough to accept that it’s How It Might Have Been; the production and set pieces feel right, the dialogue is more speech than speeches. At the same time, because it takes place over many years, with much elided, the series can sometimes feel abstract, especially when it moves away from Dolours — a history lesson in bits and pieces, rather than living history. There are powerful moments, to be sure, surrounding the human drama, but, though moral questions are duly considered, the political drama registers less intensely — apart from it all seeming more than a little mad.
As most of us won’t regard the IRA as an army at war, as it styled itself, but a terrorist organization — as was, certainly, its opposite number, the Ulster Defense Assn. — our hope will be that the sisters survive the IRA as much as their smuggling expeditions, bank robberies and prison terms. Hughes tells the Belfast Project 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 help but wish she were.