The Virtues (TV)
Shane Meadows (2019)
Accepting BAFTA’s Fellowship at their TV awards ceremony last month, Joan Bakewell hailed today’s ‘golden age’ of television. It’s an era too in which the tradition of film-going, thanks in no small part to streaming services, is disintegrating and in which more than one director who made his name with theatrical releases has turned increasingly to television – or his back on cinema. Whereas Steven Soderbergh seems to keep changing his mind about this, Shane Meadows hasn’t made a non-fiction feature since Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee in 2009. The four-part drama The Virtues on Channel 4 is Meadows’s first work for television that isn’t a continuation of the This is England story that started life in cinemas in 2006. Each of the three TV series that it spawned felt necessary. Like Meadows, we could never get enough of the characters he and his actors had created and whose lives and personalities he continued to explore.
Persisting regret that he’s no longer making cinema films has made this viewer alert to how Meadows exploits the additional screen time available to him in a mini-series. Like This is England 90 (2015), The Virtues runs a total of 270 minutes minus commercial breaks (and with the last of the four episodes ninety rather than sixty minutes). This new work makes such continuously compelling viewing that it doesn’t seem protracted as you watch. On the other hand, there’s no doubt the story, in terms of plot, could be told in two hours or less. Of course that’s not the essential criterion for how long a drama should be but in this case I think Meadows does over-extend things. He’s so rightly confident that his lead actors can keep sustaining the tension and interest of their one-on-one exchanges that he lets a few of these go round in too many circles, run on beyond the point at which they’re still imparting something new.
The protagonist is fortyish Joseph (Stephen Graham), who is battling alcoholism and depression. He has a Liverpool accent but lives in Sheffield. When his ex-partner Debbie (Juliet Ellis) emigrates to Australia with their nine-year-old son Shea (Shea-Michael Shaw), and her new partner David (Vauxhall Jermaine), Joseph buys a ferry ticket to Ireland. He goes there less to start a new life than to try and make sense of his past. He turns up at the home of Anna (Helen Behan), the sister from whom Joseph was separated as a young boy, when he was put into care. He ran away from the care home, made his way to Liverpool and was never heard of in Ireland again. Anna, now married to Michael (Frank Laverty), who runs a small building business, and with children of her own, has spent most of her life assuming her brother is dead. (I wasn’t clear how he knew exactly where to find her.) Anna and her husband welcome Joseph into their home: it’s an even fuller house with the arrival of Michael’s unsettled younger sister Dinah (Niamh Algar), who also needs – not for the first time – a roof over her head. Joseph starts work for Michael, another of whose building team is Craigy (Mark O’Halloran). He too has a chequered history and he seems to recognise Joseph.
From an early stage in the drama, Joseph experiences flashbacks to his time in the care home. My impression was that these increased in number and duration once Joseph was back in the vicinity – rather as Lee Chandler, returning to his home town in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, finds the traumatic memories of what happened there several years previously increasingly hard to suppress. The revelation of Joseph’s childhood trauma is longer coming, however, than the revelation of Lee’s more recent torment and the nature of the trauma relatively predictable. In a care facility in Ireland in the 1980s, the only question is by whom the nine-year-old Joseph was sexually abused. Midway through the last episode, he learns that the offenders were two older boys, young teenagers. The person who confirms their identity is Craigy, also resident in the care home and Joseph’s predecessor as the brothers’ choice of victim.
It was only after I’d watched The Virtues all the way through that I read Miranda Sawyer’s interview with Shane Meadows, which appeared in The Observer a week or so before the first episode was shown and in which ‘The director speaks for the first time about the horrific event from his childhood that inspired his new TV drama…’ As a nine-year-old, Meadows too was violated by two brothers, one about the same age as him, the other a few years older. The background to the assault, which took place in woods behind a public park in Meadows’s home town of Uttoxeter, was much more specific than the setting that he and Jack Thorne, who shares the writing credit, have given The Virtues. While it’s understandable, to put it mildly, that Meadows didn’t want to replicate the circumstances of his own trauma, his decision to root things in Ireland runs the risk of making Joseph’s ordeal more representative than specific – especially once, halfway through part three, Meadows and Thorne introduce another character’s tragedy.
Dinah and Joseph, soon attracted to each other, have something else in common – a son of similar age. (As will be clear from the above, nine-year-old boys resonate through The Virtues and what inspired it.) Dinah gave birth at fifteen and was forced to give up the child. Learning of Joseph’s recent separation from Shea, she’s impelled to try and make contact with her boy, through the case worker (Niamh Cusack) who arranged his adoption as a baby. In the final episode, it emerges that Dinah’s son wrote letters and sent drawings to his birth mother several years ago. She never replied, the child was very upset and his adoptive parents don’t want him upset again. Dinah didn’t reply to the letters because she knew nothing about them. They were intercepted and destroyed by her devout Catholic mother.
In the climax to episode four, each of Joseph and Dinah pays a call on the person who has so damaged their life. Joseph learns from Craigy that one of their abusers is dead and where the other is living. Joseph doesn’t think the name is right until Craigy reminds him that, in the care home, the boy in question was known by his name’s reverse spelling: Joseph remembers Nomad all right. When he turns up at his house, Joseph finds Damon (Liam Carney) bedridden and quite unrepentant. Being subject to repeated abuse himself, Damon says, made him immune to receiving and inflicting pain. Both he and Dinah’s mother (Deirdre Donnelly) wear crucifixes, although Damon, when Joseph asks about this, pronounces God, if He exists, ‘a fucking evil bastard’. The crucifix image which stands in place of the ‘T’ of ‘virtues’ in the series titles now acquires a more particular significance[1]. It also confirms the Catholic Church as – as usual – the villain of the Hibernian piece. I’m not suggesting this is wide of the mark but it does feel that Meadows is using it as a convenience – a tried-and-tested framework for his story.
Meadows’s cross-cutting between the two climactic encounters tightens their grip but also sharpens awareness of how schematic The Virtues has by this stage become. The main problem with this is the imbalance of power between the Joseph and the Dinah aspects. Although Niamh Algar gives a highly committed and convincing performance, Dinah doesn’t have anything like the textured backstory that Joseph has. It’s hard not to be aware that Meadows is using her to complement his main character – and eventually contrast with him. The threat of lethal violence hangs heavy in the confrontation between Joseph and Damon but materialises only in Dinah’s visit to her mother. Joseph tells Damon that he forgives him and walks away. Anna, after a frantic drive to try and intercept her brother’s taking revenge, arrives at Damon’s house as Joseph emerges. He gets into his sister’s car. The last shot of The Virtues shows him asleep in the passenger seat as Anna drives them home. This is a fine image and, once you realise the depth of Shane Meadows’s personal involvement in Joseph’s story, an even more eloquent one than it first seems. But it also confirms the core of the drama. So too does Craigy’s suicide, whereas the aftermath of Dinah’s matricide is conspicuous by its absence.
Stephen Graham is marvellous. In the first episode, Joseph, after a farewell meal with Debbie, David and Shea, is so miserable that he goes on a bender. Graham brings to the succeeding phases of Joseph’s getting drunk the most startling realism. His presence throughout is irresistible, whatever the character’s mood. The fury within Joseph often makes him formidable. At other times, he’s so vulnerable you think he might break. Graham uses his stockiness and his smallness to reinforce the sense of threat and fragility respectively but you never see his technique: his acting is as interior as it’s expressive. Although they’re facially very different, he and Lee Pepper, who plays Joseph as a child, have a spiritual continuity. All the cast are good although there were times, especially in the last episode, when the expletives and repetitions developed the ring of strenuous improvisation. (I felt particularly that Helen Behan, as much as Anna, was reduced to saying ‘fuck’ every second word as the crisis came to a head.) It’s churlish to criticise the quality of the acting, though. Its quality was emphasised by The Virtues being scheduled by Channel 4 in the same slot as Stephen Poliakoff’s expensive-looking, clumsy and stilted Summer of Rockets on BBC2. Regardless of my reservations about what Shane Meadows has done here, it’s still far ahead of most TV drama. Cinema’s considerable loss is television’s great gain.
15 May-5 June 2019
[1] According to Wikipedia, ‘Traditionally, the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues combine the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude) with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity’.