ONE DECEMBER evening in 1972, widowed mother of ten Jean McConville was called to the door at her home in Divis flats, Belfast.
She was never seen alive again.
McConville was kidnapped and murdered by the IRA, becoming one of the Disappeared until her remains were found decades later.
In 2018, American writer Patrick Radden Keefe published a book called Say Nothing about McConville’s disappearance and the life of Dolours Price, a Provisional IRA member who died in 2013 and who had admitted to being involved in the murder.
A mini-series adaptation of the book, also called Say Nothing, lands on Disney+ next week.
Made by the US channel FX the drama focuses on the real-life stories of McConville, Price, and others in their orbit who played an alleged role in McConville’s disappearance.
We’ve viewed five of the nine episodes for this review article – and the entire series is set to be released on Disney on Thursday of next week.
The older Dolours Price is played by Maxine Peake, who we see giving an interview about her IRA activities as part of a series of secret recordings known as the Boston Project.
As these interviews weren’t to be made public until after the subject’s death, Price was free to ostensibly give a full account of her actions. (The recordings later became the subject of a court case involving the PSNI.)
As the older Price recalls what happened to turn her from a non-violent protester to an IRA member, we flash back to meet the younger Price. Starring as young Price is the magnetic Lola Petticrew, a Belfast native who portrays Dolours as a sparky young woman who initially believes non-violent protest is the means to peace in the North.
She’s close to her sister Marian, played by Hazel Doupe, and the pair grow up in a Republican household with a father who spent time in jail and an aunt who was blinded and lost her hands while handling IRA explosives.
Because we see things mostly from Price’s point of view, the series functions in part as an explainer about why a young person would get involved in the armed struggle. We see Price’s youthful exuberance and her fears about the future, and we’re shown the 1969 incident that led her to a shift in her approach to the use of violence.
But we also find out that decades later, as we watch the older Price talking to the Belfast Project that her perspectives have shifted yet again – she’s hugely critical of the Provisional IRA’s activities.
Denials and The Dark
One of the other key characters in the series is Gerry Adams, played by Josh Finan (a British actor doing some excellent accent work). However, each episode contains a note at the end reading: “Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.”
Also high up in the IRA grouping we meet is ‘the Dark’, aka Brendan Hughes, portrayed as a charismatic leader in his younger years by actor Anthony Boyle, and then in later life – as he battles demons and deals with memories of the past – by Love/Hate star Tom Vaughan Lawlor.
On the ‘other side’ is Frank Kitson, the General who led British military operations in the North in the early 1970s. We see how Kitson used surveillance to find out information about Provisional IRA activities.
The sexism of the era is among the themes explored in Say Nothing, with Dolours Price in particular seen as both leveraging men’s view of her but also being unafraid to point out when they were being prejudiced.
The series is pacy and compelling, impeccably directed (by Michael Lennox of Derry Girls), with huge attention to detail.
The houses and costumes, with their 1970s palette that runs the short gamut from drab browns to sea blues, perfectly evoke the era.
Difficult history
Say Nothing is certainly one of the best series of the year. It has the intense and often shocking feel of another based-on-a-true-story series Chernobyl, with characters who never feel like ciphers.
It takes from Peaky Blinders in its use of contemporary music, and its needledrops are judiciously chosen (one particularly hard-hitting scene is made all the more impactful by Lankum’s rendition of The Wild Rover).
Meanwhile, the use of upbeat early 1970s singles underscores that while the rest of the world was embracing disco, Price and co were dealing with entirely different things.
It’s all so slickly done that it’s easy to forget this is based on real life. When the Price sisters casually discuss the outcome of a bombing, you need to remind yourself that these aren’t fictional deaths they’re talking about.
This is the challenge with a series about a difficult and dark part of recent Irish history, where people who were involved and affected are still alive today. This makes it a story that’s important to tell, because people are still working through its aftermath.
One of the most striking things about Price and her compatriots in Say Nothing is their youth. These are young people who should be planning their lives, who should be working or studying, out kissing and dancing, not planting bombs or being shot.
It won’t be easy viewing for some people, and there may be those who find the idea of making entertainment of Price and the Provisional IRA’s actions distasteful. And yet well-made shows like Say Nothing give us space to explore what drew young people in the North to join the IRA, what the impact of that was on their lives, and what drew them to punish those within their ranks who they saw as ‘touts’. It’s not asking us to agree with their actions, but to witness why they occurred.
Petticrew told Vanity Fair: “Some people will see Dolours as a hero—other people won’t at all. But I think it gives us the ability to try to understand why people in this particular time were making the decisions that they made, and how that trauma affected them throughout their lives.”
Zetumer also said that the Irish cast were able to give their thoughts on any moments that felt ‘off’. “In this instance, we tried to empower the cast and said, ‘Hey, I know I’m an outsider trying to do this. Please tell me if you smell bullshit,” he told Variety.
Meanwhile, Boyle (who plays the young Brendan Hughes) was nervous about showing the series to his parents as one of his mother’s earliest memories is seeing her father get pulled down the stairs by the British Army.
This isn’t a series that judges people’s actions, but instead explores the motivations of those who get involved in radical action. It’s not about who won, but about why the fight happened.
But it’s also about families like the McConvilles, who had to wait until 2003 for their mother’s body to be found.
3,720 people were killed and 47,541 injured during the three decades of The Troubles. As Say Nothing shows, the road to peace was littered with bodies.
FX’s Say Nothing Premieres on Disney+ on November 14.
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