Say Nothing could so easily be absolute chaos. It comprises at least seven narratives, jumping back and forth over four decades, with different actors playing older and younger versions of the same characters. But it has such a firm grasp of those characters – and of all its stories and the history against which they unfold – that you are never confused, only gripped throughout.
This is not to say that the nine-part drama about the Troubles is without troubling aspects, but we will get to that. Based on the bestselling 2018 book of the same name by the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, it opens with an abduction so cruel that it will become notorious – that of Jean McConville (played by Judith Roddy), a widowed mother of 10 in west Belfast. Rumoured to be an informant (although no evidence has been found that she was), she is bundled into a van by masked men in December 1972 and never seen alive again.
In Dublin, 29 years later, Dolours Price (Maxine Peake) settles in front of a cassette recorder to make her contribution to the Belfast Project: an oral history of the Troubles, gathered from those on the frontline of the murderous violence between Catholics and Protestants, Irish and British. In extended flashback – so extended that it makes up the bulk of the series – we see young Dolours (Lola Petticrew, doing fine work) growing up with her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe, doing equally fine work in a more subtle role) in a staunchly republican household.
Their initial involvement with peaceful protest gradually evolves into what some would call fanaticism, but what her proud family consider to be commitment to the cause. She is recruited to the IRA by Gerry Adams (Josh Finan when young, Michael Colgan in later years, both quietly terrifying) and Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle, continuing his recent run of impeccable performances, then Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in his disillusioned middle age), the leader of the organisation’s infamously brutal D company in the 70s.
It’s at this point that I should quote the disclaimer with which every episode of Say Nothing ends: Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence. Sometimes, this is expanded to include his denials of specific killings with which the episode has been concerned.
If the subject matter of Say Nothing were fiction, it would be a fantastically entertaining and emotive thriller. Alliances are made and broken, people sacrifice themselves for a higher cause, engage in gunfights and riots, set bombs and make escapes (or not), survive awful prison experiences, then find their lives upended by a betrayal so vast and profound that not one of them sees it coming.
But it isn’t fiction. The high-water mark of Dolours’ and Marian’s careers is bombing the Old Bailey in March 1973, injuring more than 200 people. They are sentenced to life imprisonment, reduced to 20 years, of which Dolours serves seven. The last third of the series concentrates on her life afterwards and the reckoning she and others have to make with that betrayal – Adams’ decision to take part in the peace process and his political rise as the head of Sinn Féin, interspersed with stories about her activities as one of “The Unknowns”, his special squad that took care of supposed “traitors”, and brings us full circle to the opening scenes.
It’s a terrible story – many terrible stories – of a terrible time that is barely over. And it is a beautifully acted interrogation of the power of silence, the loyalty it proves and the burden it brings. However, it feels overly sympathetic to its main characters – the sisters, Hughes and Adams.
The series darkens as it progresses, but the opening episodes – during which, for example, the girls’ induction into the IRA is presented as a feminist triumph – do not focus sharply enough on the suffering inflicted by the central characters. Bar a few flashes of conscience from Dolours towards the end of her life, there is no reckoning with what they have done. And so, as the number of deaths and orphans created by their actions mounts, Say Nothing comes to feel as though it has left too much unsaid.
• Say Nothing is on Disney+
