Belfast has become a familiar place on our screens over the past decade, serving as a noir-ish (and often uncredited) backdrop to hits such as Line of Duty and The Fall . Yet with a few notable exceptions such as gritty police drama Blue Lights there has been a reluctance to delve into the city’s tumultuous recent history as a flashpoint for the Troubles – the 30-year conflict that claimed more than 3,500 lives and inflicted societal scars that cut deep to this day. But it’s that violent history that Disney Plus’s new visceral, gripping drama Say Nothing unpacks.
It’s a high-octane dramatisation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 non-fiction bestseller and over nine episodes tells the story of mother-of-10 Jean McConville who was abducted from the Republican heart of West Belfast and subsequently murdered in December 1972. The events are told through the eyes of Dolours Price, a glamorous Provisional IRA operative best known for attempting to blow up the Old Bailey in 1973 and later for marrying actor Stephen Rea. She is played in middle age by Maxine Peake , where she is interviewed by an academic compiling an oral history of the Troubles, and as a misty-eyed young revolutionary by a scene-stealing Lola Petticrew.
The youthful Dolours is our entry point into West Belfast in the early 70s when the Troubles were in the process of becoming the UK’s very own Vietnam War. Dolours and her younger sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) are introduced as idealistically peaceful prote.
