“Say Nothing” star Lola Petticrew wasn’t stunned when their speech accepting the Irish Movie and Tv Academy prize for drama actress in February — encompassing suicide charges, punishment of trans children, paltry social housing and poor psychological well being providers of their hometown of Belfast — was greeted with vitriolic on-line feedback. “S—” was the “best” of it, demonstrating that a long time after the horrific occasions the sequence depicts, feelings nonetheless run excessive throughout Eire.
“As a young adult who still lives there,” Petticrew wonders, through Zoom, “how we get over all this stuff and deal with the intergenerational trauma.”
It’s a “war” of kinds that persists in Belfast — together with within the realm of tradition — a long time after the 1998 Good Friday Settlement heralded the closest factor but to a ceasefire between the U.Ok. and the Irish Republican Military. Extensively acclaimed when it premiered within the U.S. final fall, the FX sequence, tailored from Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning e book of the identical title, has impressed an intense, difficult response in Eire, the place the subject material hits near the bone. “There’s admiration for it as a piece of searing, unflinching storytelling but also a level of unease,” explains Irish documentarian Pam Finn (“JFK: The Three Miles”). “Some feel it reopens wounds without adding new understanding, while others see it as an essential reckoning.”
Partially, this pressure might stem from the priority, as Finn places it, that historical past “framed for international audiences” may “flatten the nuances of lived experience” — a priority that Petticrew, who performs IRA member Dolours Worth, at first shared.
“You see [FX parent company] Disney and go, ‘Why is Disney doing a Troubles piece?’ You’re kind of afraid that it’s Americans coming in and trying to tie up the Troubles into a neat little bow and go, ‘We solved it!’ And that worried me,” the actor says. Finally, although, they have been shocked by writing that “encapsulated the spirit so well” and imagine American funding allowed “Say Nothing” to be “ballsier.”
“Some of what Dolours does is not just unlikable but horrific, and I think the show does a really beautiful thing” in permitting it to “dance in those gray areas and present these characters not as heroes or villains but the situation that they are in, the decisions that they make and the emotional aftermath,” they add. “And then the audience can make up their mind. It’s not trying to do anything but make people confront themselves and what they think and provoke those big questions of what it means to move on from a conflict and trauma like that.” (As Finn notes, “The focus on women in the series, particularly in a history largely shaped by male voices, adds an important dimension to understanding the complexity of the Troubles.”)
Against this, Seán Murray, Belfast-based writer-director of 2018 documentary “Unquiet Graves,” which explores the U.Ok. authorities’s alleged collusion with native supporters of British rule in Northern Eire in 120 murders through the Nineteen Seventies, argues that “Say Nothing’s’’ perspective is one-sided. “We are 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, but the war has never ended. Now we are in a mass information war and what ‘Say Nothing’ has done is amplify a minority republican [for a united Ireland] view of what happened during the conflict.”
Murray’s grievance just isn’t with the standard of the manufacturing — “On a technical level, I thought it was very good,” he notes, praising the native actors specifically. Quite, he says, there are “huge responsibilities, particularly when you’re dealing with the traumatized,” which are at cross-purposes with the conventions of narrative TV.
Like many throughout Eire, Murray regards the sequence’ repeated disclaimer — about now-retired Sinn Féin chief Gerry Adams denying he has ever been an IRA member, regardless of being depicted within the sequence as a pacesetter of the group — with an arched forehead. “I think they were trying to troll him,” he says.
Josh Finan as younger Gerry Adams in “Say Nothing.”
(Rob Youngston / FX)
Glenn Patterson, a Belfast author, novelist and filmmaker whose work is knowledgeable by the Troubles, agreed concerning the phrases’ darkish humor: “Gerry Adams has always denied that he has been a member of the IRA. Nobody believes that, so to see that caption drew smiles.”
Patterson is an analogous age to a few of the kids of Jean McConville, the Belfast widow and mom of 10 whose December 1972 abduction, disappearance and homicide by the IRA, allegedly for being a “tout” (informer) — although the U.Ok. authorities has all the time denied this — is on the coronary heart of “Say Nothing.” In 2014, Adams was arrested in reference to the homicide of McConville, whose physique was lastly found in 2003, however he was by no means charged.
“I remember the horror of it from the very start,” Patterson says. “What that family suffered is truly, truly horrific and truly unconscionable. The lies that were told, the goading of the family, all of that is absolutely horrendous.”
The fiercest criticism, of the very choice to observe the e book’s template and construction the motion round what occurred to McConville, has come from a few of her kids. “I have not watched it nor do I intend watching it,” Michael McConville mentioned in a press release. His mom’s loss of life, he continued, “is not entertainment for me and my family. The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous, and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is.”
For all the thorny political questions examined in “Say Nothing” — in addition to by the supporters and detractors who’ve emerged because it premiered — the clever, perceptive Petticrew stays clear-eyed concerning the potentialities, and limitations, of their function.
“Our job as actors is to show up and film what’s in the script. I just went in understanding that there’s the Dolours in real life, the Dolours in Patrick’s book and the Dolours in our script, and I could only play the Dolours in our script. That felt like the appropriate headspace for me to be in.”
That groundedness has allowed Petticrew to maintain their very own accolades, together with a nomination for a BAFTA TV Award, in perspective. With some assist from a sure four-legged “North Star.”
“My dog Cúan gives me so much peace and serenity. Dogs slow your life down so much. I found out that I got the BAFTA nomination and had to pick up the gnarliest dog s— ever. There’s nothing that’s going to humble you like your dog that doesn’t know and doesn’t care what the f— a BAFTA is.”
