“Don’t say anything” begins in a state of knotted suspense: an opening voiceover by Lola Petticrew’s determined Dolours Price lets us know we’re entering a battle between the British and the Irish, “same old shit”, it has spanned over 800 years.

Shortly after this cold opening, we cut to the beginning as an unnamed interviewer (Seamus O’Hara) sits across from Dolours (Maxine Peake). The man is working on compiling an oral history of the Troubles for Boston College’s Belfast project. Dolours, a former Provisional Irish Republican Army militant, is visibly nervous. She is a movie star’s wife at this point in her story, long past her days of planting bombs in the name of struggle.

She also knows what happens to old soldiers with loose lips.

Her interviewer tries to calm her down. “What I’m going to ask you about is ancient history,” he says.

“Not for them,” says Dolours. Watching from a surveillance-age perch, her reticence is understandable. We also understand the pain that results from a refusal to bring dark history into the light.

Say Nothing (FX)

Dolours Price is just one person. Perhaps she is also a stand-in for a nation constantly haunted by the Troubles, the violent escalation between Northern Ireland’s Catholics and Protestant loyalists that “Say Nothing” travels through. As young adults, Dolours (Petticrew) and Marian Price (Hazel Doupe) were swept up in a movement that caught fire in the late 1960s and tore through the 70s, 80s and most of the 90s.

In the early years, an older, wiser Dolours is disillusioned with the futility of so much bloodshed and wonders what it means to have so many spent matches poking at her from her pockets.

Peake’s steady and deliberate portrayal contrasts and complements Petticrew’s, whose resolute manner oscillates between flinty bravado and genuine anguish. Petticrew takes us through Doloure’s youth through her and Marian’s harrowing imprisonment. In scenes that show Dolour’s dedication to the mission clashing with her affection for her friends, the actor’s stoic expressiveness is heartbreaking.

Television exploits our memory gaps, knowingly or unwittingly, by producing periodic action dramas centered on the gigantic conflicts of history, most related to World War II. Unlike the endlessly commodified conflict, these chapters of Irish history do not appear in most history lessons. Those who learn about them at all do so via family or social studies.

Say Nothing (FX)

This silence, evoked by the title, describes the organizational omerta under which the IRA operated and the unspoken agreement between its operatives and the people they lived among. In one scene, a small boy sits near an IRA soldier and watches British officers silently roll up in vehicles, not flinching as the man runs away, bullets whizzing past his head. When you’ve lived your whole life under that order, seeing and saying nothing becomes a survival plan.

“Say Nothing” is a historical limited series about a war fought on neighborhood streets and on doorsteps, in a country the rest of the world believes is at peace. As Patrick Radden Keefe’In the 2018 book, it takes a look at that era, using the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) to represent the collateral damage caused by the actions of the IRA.

Members of the paramilitary force insist their cause is a righteous continuation of resistance to British rule that dates back to the Norman invasion in the 12th century. McConville, a widow torn from her home as her 10 crying children look on helplessly, personifies what happens when the battlefield extends into civilian neighborhoods. Innocents inevitably become the by-catch.

Since “Say Nothing” takes place primarily through Doloure’s perception, the question of whether McConville is an informant hangs over these nine episodes. We see a widow struggling to raise her children in West Belfast’s Divis Flats, a public housing complex. But the Price sisters trust their fellow strangers, especially Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle), known as “The Dark”, and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), the leader who takes pictures behind the scenes.

One can certainly discuss this limited series in isolation from other critically acclaimed shows, but it’s more interesting to see it as part of a continuum that speaks to our present, be it thematically or parabolically.

FX’s highest profile and most acclaimed limited series prior to “Say Nothing” is “Shogun,” a reinvention of a Reagan-era bestseller told from a Japanese perspective. This valuable correction avoided its the predecessor’s white savior trapand it also seduced audiences into rooting for an isolationist authoritarian.

We might think of “Say Nothing” as the bitter elucidation of an entertainment landscape that romanticizes imperialism as corseted glasses a la “Bridgerton” and “Mary and George” – or, through modern dramas such as “The crown“colonialist domination is heavy and defined by duty and despair.

Dolours Ireland and Marian’s youth in “Say Nothing” is a tough place where circumstances led them to grow up on a diet of war stories. Fighting with the IRA is in the blood. Their father, Albert (Stuart Graham), has retired, as has their mother, Chrissie (Kerri Quinn), although she still hides guns in her garden soil.

Raised on a steady diet of war stories, and with a chain-smoking aunt who gave her eyesight and two arms to the cause, the pair join the IRA, intending to do more than secretarial work. So they are assigned to a secret organization called The Unknown, under whose banner they rob banks and run explosives through border checkpoints, eventually carrying out a major bombing that earns them top status in the organization’s “brothers-in-arms” culture.

“Derry Girls” director Mike Lennox infuses a necessary liveliness into a dark story that links to current issues in more ways than just thematically. The tape-recorded content of the Belfast Project was intended as a historical record of a story deliberately left untold, guaranteeing anonymity to the participants, who were assured of release only after the last interviewee died.

Say Nothing (FX)

A major thread in the story implicates the very much still alive Gerry Adams, who became leader of the Sinn Féin political party in 1983, as the man who ordered Jean McConville’s kidnapping as a high-ranking IRA leader. But as the disclaimer attached to each episode tells us, and the fictional versions of Adams played by Finan and later Michael Colgan, insist that any allegations that he was ever part of the IRA are false.

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Apparently, the adaptation’s creator Joshua Zetumer and Keefe, an executive producer, come down on the side that insists he played a key role in the IRA. Furthermore, the script transforms him, through Finan’s effective performance, from a crazed, bespectacled broadcasting geek into an incredible political predator.

“Say Nothing” is a heavy watch, and it remains to be seen whether American viewers will be in the mood to dive into a drawn-out story of resistance so soon after an election won by a ruling force eager to win millions over to his side. countrymen, whether financially or by force.

But riveting performances by Peake, Petticrew, Doupe and a fiery Boyle see us through the darkness of the days and years captured in its nine instalments. Modern life in the West is a growing series of the consequences of pretending to be done with history, only to find that its unforgiving chapters won’t let us be.

Erasing people’s stories diminishes their humanity. Intensely thought-out adaptations like this restore it and open our eyes to corners of recent history that we might otherwise miss and benefit from knowing.

All nine episodes of “Say Nothing” debut Thursday, Nov. 14 on Hulu.