Shortly after this cold open we cut to the early aughts when a nameless interviewer (Seamus O'Hara) sits across from Dolours (Maxine Peake). The man is working to compile an oral history of the Troubles for Boston College's Belfast Project. Dolours, a former Provisional Irish Republican Army militant, is visibly nervous. She's a movie star's wife at this point in her story, well past her days of setting bombs in the name of struggle.
She also knows what happens to old soldiers with loose lips.
Her interviewer tries to reassure her. “The stuff I’ll be asking you about is all ancient history,” he says.
“Not to them,” says Dolours. Watching from a perch in the surveillance age, her reticence is understandable. We also understand the pain resulting from a refusal to bring dark history into the light.
Dolours Price is but one person. Maybe she's also a stand-in for a nation perpetually haunted by the Troubles, the violent escalation between Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestant loyalists through which “Say Nothing” travels. As young adults Dolours (Petticrew) and Marian Price (Hazel Doupe) become swept up in a movement that caught fire in the late 1960s and tore through the ‘70s, ‘80s and most of the '90s.
By the early aughts an older, wiser Dolours is disillusioned with the meaninglessness of so much bloodshed and pondering what it means to have so many spent matches poking her from inside her pockets.
Peake’s staid and knowing portrayal stands in contrast and complement to that of Petticrew, whose resolute manner vacillates between a flinty swagger and true anguish. Petticrew leads us through Dolours' youth through her and Marian's harrowing imprisonment. In scenes showing Dolours' commitment to the mission clashing with her affection for her friends, the actor’s stoic expressiveness is heartbreaking.
Television exploits our memory gaps, willful or unintended, by churning out period action dramas centered on history’s giant conflicts, most related to World War II. Unlike that endlessly commodified conflict, these chapters in Ireland’s history don’t turn up in most history teaching. Those who learn about them at all do so via family or community lore.
This silence, evoked by the title, describes the organizational omerta under which the IRA operated and the unspoken agreement between its operatives and the people they lived among. In one scene a little boy sits near an IRA soldier watching British officers quietly roll up in vehicles and doesn’t flinch as the man runs off and bullets whiz by his head. When you’ve lived your whole life under that order, seeing and saying nothing becomes a survival plan.
“Say Nothing” is a historical limited series about a war fought in neighborhood streets and on doorsteps, in a country the rest of the world believes is at peace. Like Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 book, it takes an inside view of that era, using the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) to represent the collateral damage caused by the IRA’s acts.
Members of the paramilitary force insist their cause is a righteous continuance of resistance to British rule extending back to the Norman invasion in the 12th century. McConville, a widow ripped from her home as her 10 crying children helplessly watch, personifies what happens when the battlefield extends into civilian neighborhoods. Innocents inevitably become the bycatch.
Since “Say Nothing” primarily unfolds through Dolours’ perception, the question of whether McConville is an informant hangs over these nine episodes. We see a widow struggling to raise her kids in West Belfast’s Divis Flats, a public housing complex. But the Price sisters trust their fellow Unknowns, especially Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle), known as “The Dark,” and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), the leader calling the shots from behind the scenes.
One can certainly discuss this limited series divorced from other critically acclaimed shows, but it’s more interesting to view it as part of a continuum that speaks to our present, whether thematically or parabolically.
FX’s highest profile and most acclaimed limited series before “Say Nothing” is “Shogun,” a reimagining of a Reagan-era bestseller told from the Japanese perspective. This worthwhile corrective avoided its predecessor’s white savior trap, and it also seduced the audience into rooting for an isolationist authoritarian.
We might think of “Say Nothing,” then, as the bitter clarifier to an entertainment landscape that romanticizes imperialism as corseted spectacles a la “Bridgerton” and “Mary and George” — or, through modern dramas like “The Crown" that style colonialist dominance as weighty and defined by duty and despair.
The Ireland of Dolours and Marian’s youth in “Say Nothing” is a hardscrabble place where circumstances led to them being raised on a diet of war stories. Fighting with the IRA is in their blood. Their father, Albert (Stuart Graham), has retired, as has their mother, Chrissie (Kerri Quinn), although she still hides guns in her gardening soil.
Raised on a steady diet of war stories, and with a chain-smoking aunt who gave her eyesight and two arms to the cause, the pair join the IRA intending to do more than secretarial work. So they’re assigned a secret organization dubbed The Unknowns, under whose banner they rob banks and run explosives through border checkpoints, eventually pulling off a larger-scale bombing that earns them top status in the organization’s “brothers-in-arms” culture.
“Derry Girls” director Mike Lennox infuses a necessary liveliness into a dark story that links to present concerns in more ways than simply thematic. The content recorded on Belfast Project tapes was meant as a historical record of a history left intentionally untold, guaranteed anonymity for its participants, who were assured they’d only be released after the last interviewee died.
A major thread in the story implicates the very much still alive Gerry Adams, who became the leader of the Sinn Féin political party in 1983, as the man who ordered Jean McConville’s kidnapping as a high-ranking IRA leader. But as the disclaimer attached to each episode tells us, and the fictionalized versions of Adams played by Finan and, later, Michael Colgan, insist, all allegations that he was ever part of the IRA are false.
Obviously the adaptation's creator Joshua Zetumer and Keefe, an executive producer, land on the side that insists he played a key role in the IRA. Moreover, the script transitions him, through Finan’s effective performance, from a gawky, bespectacled nerd putting on airs, into an unctuous political predator.
“Say Nothing” is a heavy watch, and it remains to be seen whether American viewers will be in the mood to dive into a drawn-out resistance story so soon after an election won by a governing force eager to bring to heel millions of his countrymen, whether economically or by force.
But captivating performances by Peake, Petticrew, Doupe and a fiery Boyle deliver us through the darkness of the days and years captured in its nine installments. Modern life in the West is an expanding raft of the consequences resulting from pretending to be finished with history, only to find its unreconciled chapters won’t let us be.
Erasing people’s stories diminishes their humanity. Intensely thoughtful adaptations like this restore it, opening our eyes to corners of recent history we’d otherwise miss and benefit from knowing.
All nine episodes of "Say Nothing" debut Thursday, Nov. 14 on Hulu.
