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.
