Code of silence

Say Nothing writer and executive producer Patrick Radden Keefe discusses the dramatisation of his own book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and explains why the Disney+ series serves as a cautionary tale for divided societies threatening to tip into violence.

When it debuted in 2018, Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing received widespread acclaim for its examination of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Centring on the stories of Jean McConville, a mother-of-10 who was abducted in 1972, and Dolours Price, who became the first woman to join the IRA as a frontline soldier, the book won numerous awards, was highlighted by Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2019 and was recently ranked 19th on the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

The events and figures from Keefe’s work have now been dramatised for television in a nine-part series of the same name. A gripping, unflinching and tragic thriller that is at times a coming-of-age story with moments of humour, Say Nothing begins with the disappearance of McConville, who was never seen alive again.

It then moves between the past and the present to explore the lengths to which some people went in the name of their beliefs, how a divided society can erupt in conflict and the emotional and psychological cost of years of radical violence and a code of silence.

Central to the story are Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe), young women who became symbols of radical politics, as well as charismatic but conflicted military strategist Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and political operator Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), who would go on to negotiate peace yet has always denied any involvement with the IRA. Maxine Peake also stars as older Dolours as she recounts her own involvement with the IRA, which saw her jailed for her role in the 1973 bombing of London’s Old Bailey court.

Keefe himself has been a major part of the project, working as an executive producer on the series, which is produced by FX Productions and launches on Disney+ tomorrow.

“I’m really delighted, and I’m proud,” he tells DQ of the show. “I was very involved in the production, so I have seen the various iterations of it from the earliest scripts to the final edits. In those moments, you get so close to the thing that it’s only in recent weeks I’ve been able to back up and see that we’ve created something special. It feels like it captures the DNA of the book, but also that it is its own freestanding creation. And I’m proud of it.”

The American writer jokes that though his name is “obnoxiously Irish,” he has no personal connection to the events he has spent years researching and writing about, despite people frequently assuming the opposite. In fact, he first came to the story of Dolours Price when he read her obituary in The New York Times in 2013. A writer at The New Yorker magazine, Keefe was “fascinated” by the idea of someone who, in her early 20s, became the first woman to join the IRA as a “full soldier” but was then full of misgivings for her actions later in life.

“That to me was the original seed of this project, the idea of what happens when a radical gets old and starts to reconsider,” he says. “Is there a way to tell a story where you’re trying to understand the decisions that she made joining an organisation like the IRA, planting bombs in London and [doing] things that are kind of horrifying? You really try to understand the motivation and how she got into it, but then you see how she felt about those decisions over the long term.”

Price’s story then became a conflict in itself between a person’s politics and humanity – something that also intrigued Say Nothing showrunner Joshua Zetumer. “That was very much what I was thinking with the book, and it’s something that is captured in the show,” Keefe says.

Between the book and TV series, Say Nothing has now been a part of Keefe’s life for 10 years, after he took his first trips to Belfast in 2014 for an article that would be published in The New Yorker in 2015. The series alone has been five years in the making since his initial meetings with executive producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson from Color Force.

Keefe says he wouldn’t have made a deal for the rights to his book unless he trusted those involved, given the sensitivity of the story. But having known Simpson for a decade and as an admirer of previous Color Force series The People vs OJ Simpson, another true story based on a book, he was happy to partner with the company on an adaptation of Say Nothing.

“My hope when they approached me was if we can do something where it’s its own thing, it’s not the book, but it reaches a broad audience and does it in a way that feels really nuanced and sensitive, and you’re looking at really vexing issues but in a new light, then that could be great,” he says. “In a way it was a big leap of faith, but it was based on their track record, the things they’ve made.”

That Simpson and Jacobson also invited Keefe on board as an EP sealed the deal, and he has been working closely on the project with Zetumer ever since. “There was this sense [from them] that we want to get this right,” he notes. “It’s such an interesting, challenging story. We want to get this right and we want to make something that’s different from anything else on television, which I think it is.”

While stories are usually told from the perspectives of heroes and villains – and the story of the Troubles is no exception – the truth is often messier, and Keefe believes that particularly applies to the story of Dolours Price when it comes to dramatising a very human story about a woman trying to change the world and her often shocking actions to achieve that goal.

“You find yourself in an almost queasy intimacy with these people who do some awful things,” says the writer, who found present-day events overtook development of the series when Black Lives Matter protests broke out across the US.

“When I was working on the book, it really felt like a period piece, like I was describing this foreign time and place,” he explains. “Then when we started putting together the show, you had protests on the streets in the US. You had militarised cops going out and tear-gassing rioters. You could look out your window and it felt as though the world was a little bit on fire, that there were these deep divisions.

“Part of what I think we’re trying to capture is what’s it like to be a young person in that situation, trying to think about how you go about changing the world and thinking through the available options that are there for you.”

The challenge Keefe faced with both the book and the series was showing how Dolours and others considered it romantic to join the IRA, without romanticising that idea himself. That’s where the abduction of McConville comes in at the start of the series. “The first person you meet in the series is Jean McConville, so you’re always reminded of the hangover of the consequences and the human cost,” he notes.

“I’ve never been interested in caricature-ish, moustache-twirling villains or saintly heroes. I’m interested in human complication, and part of what we were trying to understand is how would somebody who is a young person who has other opportunities decide to take up arms against the state in this way? The only way to do that was to look in an unblinking way at these women and create them with an intimacy so that you’re forced to understand them in a way that’s almost uncomfortable, in a way where you find yourself relating to them, and then suddenly they turn a corner and they do some awful thing you can’t relate to at all. To me, that’s a really interesting way to tell a story.”

Keefe, together with Zetumer and fellow EPs Edward McDonnell, Monica Levinson and Northern Ireland native Michael Lennox, spent “a huge amount of time” working out the structure of the series, though they always knew there would be two timeframes. That then led to the question of casting, and whether there should be one set of actors aged up and down, or two sets playing older and younger versions of the same characters.

“But one of the things that was really important to us was that the Price sisters – one of the main focuses of the show – were really young during these years, and so we felt it was very important to cast actors who were really young,” Keefe says. “At that point, we decided, ‘OK, we’re going to do older and younger actors.’

“Then the question was, structurally, how are you cutting back and forth? We kept thinking about the movie Goodfellas, because that’s the perfect version of cutting from a young actor to an older actor. Now when you cut back and forth between Maxine Peake and Lola Petticrew, to me, I really buy it.”

Coming to work in a television writers room was a “thrilling” experience for Keefe, and he found the journey to bringing Say Nothing to the screen far removed from the usual writer-editor relationship he has when penning articles or books.

“On a TV production, there’s all these people, there’s budgets, there’s weather, there’s cast, there’s all these different variables, things you can’t control. But there’s also things you can do that are hard to do on the page,” he says. “The horror of that Jean McConville abduction is so visceral when you watch it. Every single take, you would look around the monitor and everybody was crying. You couldn’t watch that happen, hear the screams of those children and not feel it in your gut in a way that it’s hard to do on the page. It’s hard to create that raw emotional reaction.

“So I was very conscious of the fact that there’s a power you can achieve, an emotional power you can achieve in drama that, try as we might, we may not be able to conjure in the pages of a book.”

The series was filmed in parts of England and Northern Ireland over nine months, with more than 200 speaking parts involved in telling a story set over four decades. In fact, 1970s Belfast was largely recreated in Liverpool and on a backlot in Watford, while the block of flats where McConville (played by Judith Roddy) lived was found in Sheffield.

Keefe particularly praises the show’s attention to detail and “really brilliant” production design, with the creative team steering away from the idea the Troubles only existed in old photos and black-and-white BBC newsreels.

“There was lots of colour, and if you look at photos from the time, there were all these pops of colour. So the colour scheme was something that was really important too,” he says. “We wanted it to feel on the one hand very much about the 1970s, but on the other hand really contemporary.”

With the show launching in the wake of the recent US election and waves of unrest and turbulence felt around the world, Keefe believes Say Nothing serves as a cautionary tale about what can happen when division and tension in society tip over into violence – and how that shapes people’s lives for years to come.

“This is a story about young people deciding how far you take your politics. How do you respond? How do you build a life? How do you plan in a world that feels full of injustice and division?” he says. “I would also say it’s about the excitement of those types of choices. There’s bank heists and all kinds of chases, surprises and suspense. There’s all the things you would associate with just a great drama, incredible performances, but also there is this sense of tragedy over time. Brad describes the story as a thriller that turns into a tragedy. That’s a really apt description.”

tagged in: Color Force, Disney, FX Productions, Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing