“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 v.