REBELS WITH A CAUSE

In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour.

- INKOO KANG

Dolours and Marian Price (Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe, respectively), two teen-age sisters born and raised in Belfast, are confronted almost immediately with the clash of expectations versus reality. The pair are still novice militants when they decide to devise their own mission, entering a local bank sporting nuns’ habits and guns and announcing their intent to “liberate” funds on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. The heist doesn’t go smoothly. A stern-faced woman refuses to coöperate, calling the sisters’ disguises “sacrilege”; a visibly panicked Marian implores her to lie down, sweetening the request with a “pretty please.” In the end, the stunt nets the I.R.A. just thirty-eight quid, but the sisters are giddy. “We’re all anyone’s talking about right now,” Dolours declares. That, she believes, is “fucking priceless.”

For such a scrappy operation, image is everything. It’s difficult to deny the worthiness, even the romance, of the Republican cause: the Irish have been resisting English invasion, colonization, and exploitation for eight centuries. The Price siblings see themselves as part of that grand tradition, as did their parents before them. (In the pilot, the sisters’ father, Albert, regales his young daughters at the dinner table with tales of bombmaking and prison beatings.) By the early nineteen-seventies, when the series begins, the movement had splintered, with some taking up arms to secure Northern Ireland’s independence from British rule. “Say Nothing” understands—and often captures—the excitement and allure of this fight. But the show is ultimately preoccupied with the way violence comes to weigh on its perpetrators, however noble their aims, and with the gulf between what the I.R.A. should’ve been and what it actually was.