This provocative, far-reaching four-part Channel 4 drama focuses on an illicit love-affair between a young female primary school teacher Cushla and an older Protestant human rights solicitor, Michael Agnew, who has chosen to represent three IRA members who claim police brutality against them. They meet in a popular Belfast bar owned and managed by Cushla's brother where Michael is counted as one of the locals, although it's also frequented by off-duty soldiers from the occupying/peacekeeping British Army, depending on your political point of view.
Although she has another fellow-teacher, the on-the-surface bland and unexciting Gerry, pursuing her, she's soon headlong into an intensely passionate and physical affair with Michael, even as she knows he's married with a son. They're soon making trysts in his city centre love-nest, but the deeper the affair goes, the more strain their burgeoning relationship will come under.
Cushla has other worries too. Her recently widowed mother has hit the bottle hard and is becoming increasingly difficult to live with while the sympathy she shows to the family of one of her young pupils, the offspring of a mixed-religion couple, also brings her trouble.
It all comes to a head with the shocking climax to episode three, leaving Cushla to pick up the pieces and try to deal with the aftermath of her affair. Personally, I found the fourth and final episode to be somewhat anti-climactic in terms of tying up the loose ends, while the tag-on sugar-coated epilogue likewise also seemed unnecessary.
The evocation of mid-70's Northern Ireland was certainly captured in terms of the fashions, cars and domestic and public house interiors, although the choices of background and incidental music had me reaching for the mute button. The bitterness between the two sides of the religious divide and especially those caught in the middle by entering into mixed religion relationships was well brought out. Lola Petticrew as Cushla came over well as the unwitting party caught literally in the cross-hairs of sectarian hatred, Tom Cullen was good too as the handsome charming adulterer, but the real eye-opening performance was by Gi(llia)n Anderson as Cushla's "Gin, gin, everywhere" waste-of-space mother.
For the most part then, this was a gritty and believable series, all the more so as I grew up in Glasgow at around this time. Although I was aware of religious prejudice around me, I couldn't begin to comprehend living with its ugly, tribal manifestation as represented here just across the Irish Sea at the very same time.
