The Troubles Are Too Big for ‘Say Nothing’ to Contain

“I did things, Stephen, and I don’t even know what I think about them.”

This is Dolours Price, in a later episode of the new FX/Hulu miniseries Say Nothing. Dolours (played as a young woman by Lola Petticrew, and as an older one by Maxine Peak) has spent much of her life fighting on behalf of liberating Northern Ireland from British control. Her methods have often been violent, including the 1973 car bombing of London’s Old Bailey courthouse. And she has often been called upon to drive traitors to the cause to be executed by IRA leadership. 

It’s a heavy burden to bear, even for a cause she believes in so dearly, and it’s one she wrestles with throughout all of Say Nothing. The show, adapted by Joshua Zeutner from the nonfiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe, also finds itself sorting through its feelings about what Dolours, her sister Marian (played by Hazel Doupe, and then Helen Behan), and their IRA colleagues did in their quest for Irish independence by any means necessary. At times, especially early on, it casts them as charming rogues on the side of righteousness. (In one episode, the sisters even pose as nuns to rob a bank.) At others, it sees them as every bit as monstrous as the British soldiers whose occupying rule they’re fighting to end, and the true believers as terrible in their own ways as the revolutionaries who are eventually revealed to be cynical sellouts. 

This level of ambiguity is fitting for an account of an ugly history that features many villains on many sides of the fight. Some of the best moments in Say Nothing acknowledge the nuances and unexpected ramifications of bad decisions made for what were supposed to be noble reasons. Where the miniseries runs into trouble is not in deciding what it thinks about Dolours but in figuring out how to tell her story. Or perhaps the problem starts with the decision to turn this into Dolours’ story in the first place. 

Keefe’s doorstop of a book is an overview of the Troubles — a violent period from the late Sixties through the late Eighties — but also a mystery about the 1972 abduction of single mother Jean McConville from the Belfast apartment where she was raising 10 children, and a character study of several of the major players from this period. Zeutner and company try to incorporate all of this, while also streamlining things so that the narrative is told predominantly through the eyes of Dolours. She is among the IRA delegation that drags Jean McConville away from her kids. She is a key player in Belfast as the violence against the Brits grows exponentially. We meet other significant figures, like local IRA cell leaders Gerry Adams (Josh Finan, then Michael Colgan) and Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle, then Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), but we mostly know them from how they interact with the Price sisters.

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In many ways, this makes dramatic sense. The sprawl of this story is easier to capture in print than in filmed drama; a multipronged series like The Wire remains the exception, not the rule. Dolours began as a believer in nonviolent protest, only to later become a setter of bombs and accomplice to murder. She worked closely with Gerry Adams for a while. She also became both infamous and mildly famous, marrying Irish actor Stephen Rea later in life. Her story isn’t the same as that of every other key IRA figure, but she works as a reasonable stand-in, and both Petticrew and Peak bring her to vivid life at various ages(*). 

(*) Due to a quirk of timing, this show, which spans multiple decades of the 20th century and changes over its entire cast once the characters hit middle age, arrives only days after the series finale of My Brilliant Friend, which did both of those things. 

The problem is that, outside of an episode focused entirely on the 203-day hunger strike that Dolours and Marian staged in prison, Say Nothing keeps trying to also incorporate pieces of the larger story in ways that dilute the show’s overall impact, even when individual scenes and performances work well. 

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The second episode, for instance, introduces the great English character actor Rory Kinnear (currently also playing the British prime minister on The Diplomat) as Frank Kitson, the new British garrison commander whose success protecting British interests against hostile locals in Kenya has given him a new assignment to get Belfast under control. Kitson, who has taught his daughter to refer to the Troubles as an insurgency, rather than a war, because calling it a war “gives the terrorists legitimacy,” is a fascinating villain. And he has an interesting dynamic with Sarah Jane (Amy Molloy), a local Protestant woman whom he can send undercover into Catholic neighborhoods. But the characters simply vanish before the halfway point as the story begins leaping forward in time, eventually making it past the turn of the century to show Dolours’ middle-aged regret. There are occasionally scenes showing what Hughes and/or Adams are up to away from the sisters, but not quite enough to make things land with necessary emotional force when the two men have a philosophical schism in their later years(*). 

(*) It also doesn’t help that each episode has to conclude with a disclaimer noting that the real Gerry Adams has always denied any involvement in the IRA. While legally necessary, it undercuts several turns of the way the show tells the story. 

Mostly, though, it’s the Jean McConville mystery that feels extraneous in this telling. Just as Dolours is meant to narratively stand in for so many of her comrades in arms, McConville is a there as a symbol of the Troubles’ vast collateral damage, and of the many ways the IRA could do great harm to the people it claimed to protect. But there’s precisely the wrong amount of her and her kids (primarily eldest daughter Helen, played as an adult by Laura Donnelly). They’re not given enough screen time to feel as three-dimensional as Dolours and some of her allies, yet they keep coming back every time it feels like Say Nothing has invested itself in some other aspect of this tale. 

Michael Lennox and the show’s other directors get excellent performances out of everyone, and find smart ways to visually convey how men like Brendan were able to elude capture for so long, simply because they knew the neighborhoods — and, more importantly, the neighbors — better than the British soldiers. The show is sometimes less clear about its timeline, especially as it bounces back and forth between the young Dolours in action and her older version talking about it for a historical archive project.

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It’s a big, important story, but one told better in individual pieces than as a whole. 

All nine episodes of Say Nothing are now streaming on Hulu. I’ve seen the whole thing.