Culture
The Walsh Sisters review: A poor attempt to bring Marian Keyes’ best-selling novels to the screen
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It’s a shame The Walsh Sisters (RTÉ One, Sunday 9.30pm) doesn’t do a better job of bringing Marian Keyes’ best-selling novels about five Dublin siblings to the screen. The books are adored, but this adaptation runs aground on a lack of chemistry between the leads, who seem less like beloved sisters than strangers who live under the same roof by force of circumstance.
You also have to wonder if there was A budget. Several scenes chronicling the sisters’ late-night escapades appear to have been shot on the Fair City set and do an unconvincing job capturing the bustle and edge of Dublin nightlife. It all feels cheap and disposable when Keyes fans will have wanted something more sumptuous and fully realised.
Adapted from Keyes’ novels Rachel’s Holiday and Anybody Out There, the six-part series introduces us to sisters Anna (Louise Harland), Rachel (Caroline Menton), Claire (Danielle Galligan), Helen (Máiréad Tyers) and Maggie (Stefanie Preissner, who also wrote the script with Kefi Chadwick).
The idea is that the Walsh sisters are as thick as anything. But at no point do you believe that they grew up together. Tyers seems under instructions to speak in her own Cork accent, for instance, while Galligan sounds like the living embodiment of Dublin 4 privilege. It isn’t that they belong in different shows so much as that they’ve beamed down from separate universes.
It’s never pleasant to say this, but The Walsh Sisters also has a weird attitude towards middle-aged women, as embodied by Carrie Crowley’s performance as the sisters’ embittered mother. The cliche of the Irish mother who hates her daughters feels a bit long in the tooth and, I’m sure, does not reflect the reality for most Irish people.
The series could have done without it. Crowley comes across as uncomfortable in the part, which perhaps explains her one-note performance. I could be wrong, and maybe the layers will be peeled back in future episodes, but in part one, at least, her character is distracting and inauthentic.
The Walsh Sisters also suffers from a bad case of “did you leave the immersion on?” syndrome, whereby tropes of Irish life are exaggerated to the point where they become unrecognisable. There’s an ongoing joke about Mammy Walsh having a “good room” – but, outside of Reddit, has any Irish person referred to their livingroom as such? It’s like stumbling upon a Twitter feed from 10 years ago foundering under an excess of Tayto references. Meanwhile, as the father, Aidan Quinn dials the “dozy Irish dad” routine up to 12.
Where The Walsh Sisters does well is in grappling with addiction. Rachel is on a drug- and booze-fuelled path to self-destruction, and this has driven a wedge between her and her boyfriend, Luke (Jay Duffy). Her downward spiral is powerfully portrayed and reminds us that addiction is not confined to any particular segment of society. Sadly, in other respects, The Walsh Sisters does not convince. Oh brother, does this feel like a missed opportunity.
