The entrancing actor Denise Gough makes very good choices by playing characters who rarely do.
Last year she won an Olivier award for her engrossing performance as Emma, a performer and addict wrestling with recovery, in Duncan Macmillan's brilliant play People, Places and Things. Currently, she is the Valium-popping, wildly hallucinating Harper, married to a repressed gay man in Angels in America at the National Theatre in London. Now, following a string of notable supporting roles on screen, she is the titular Paula (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9pm), a woman who is trying to do the right thing, and not quite succeeding.
“Oh, what the f**k am I doing?” she whispers to herself, alone in bed with a soft shrug. This is a very good question, and not because Paula’s rashness is implausible, but rather because Gough makes her seem all too real. So far, she has just about rebuffed Phillip (Edward MacLiam), a fellow teacher in a rugby-playing boys’ school, with whom she has had an ill-advised affair, then impulsively slept with the handyman, James (Tom Hughes), who has come to clear her basement of rats. “This is madness,” she tells James. “You could be a psycho for all I know.” If only it was that simple.
Written by Conor McPherson, in the acclaimed playwright's first television script, Paula is a drama about obsession, set in a version of Dublin that is part noir, part psychological horror. This explains why nobody ever switches on a light in Paula, preferring to slip around in moody shadows and the amber glow of street-lamp fluorescence. Under Alex Holmes's direction, either they've got something to hide, or they're neurotically energy-saving.
McPherson’s sharp, understated dialogue, Holmes’ brisk pacing and Gough’s expert performance initially suggest a careful realism, yet the show keeps nudging at something beyond. Take the descending silhouettes of Gough and MacLiam as they warily inspect her basement (always a serviceable metaphor for lurking secrets). Or the suspiciously good-looking James, who is finding it hard to maintain two families under the same roof on a handyman’s salary, given a menacing intensity by Hughes.
Still, the most unsettling thing about Paula, to Dublin viewers at least, will be the weird shape-shifting character it affords the city. Set firmly in the capital, but filmed in Northern Ireland, people, places and things here seems slightly uncanny, as though Dublin had been shifted into a vivid but unsettled dream.
Familiar but unplaceable, that accentuates the creeping unease of the show, where one jump moment – following a scratching insistence in the back of James’s van – is similar destabilising: is that the vision of his troubled mind or signs of genuinely supernatural infestation? (On stage, that ambiguity has long been McPherson’s calling card.)
The encouraging first episode of a three-part drama ends with a body in a quarry, a police investigation and no obvious resolution. That seems appropriate. If Belfast can now pass for Dublin as easily as it does for Westeros, then nothing is what it seems.
