Fifteen-Love (streaming on Prime Video) is mixed-doubles TV with an Irish twist. It stars the Irish newcomer Ella Lily Hyland as a tennis ingenue fallen on hard times and Clondalkin’s Aidan Turner as her slimy former coach. Neither is allowed to use their natural accent and must adopt a generic English twang instead. But each puts in a compelling performance, and they have a combustible anti-chemistry as the victim and suspect in a sexual-assault case.
Turner is the better known of the two. Four years after Poldark ended, he could also do with a hit. Since he hung up his tricorne hat and put his shirt back on, there is a sense that British television doesn’t quite know what to do with this unlikely pin-up of the chattering classes.
He was miscast as Leonardo da Vinci in an Italian TV biopic. And he seemed uncomfortable as a manipulative Dublin-born medic in the workaday ITV thriller The Suspect. Those who believe he peaked as the charming dwarf Kili in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films have had no cause to revise their opinion.
His character in Fifteen-Love is no less reprehensible and gaslighting than the one in The Suspect, but – and maybe it’s the smooth English accent – Turner has no trouble disappearing into the role. He’s matched by Hyland, who could well join Saoirse Ronan in the roll-call of top-tier acting talent from Carlow.
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She is impressive here as the headstrong tennis wunderkind Justine. A flashback shows her kissing her coach, Glenn (Turner), before a crucial French Open tie. She then injures her wrist and exits the tournament in agony. Five years later her career has unravelled and her coach has dumped her.
Justine is now working as a physio at an exclusive tennis camp, her personality a coping mechanism to deflect from her crushed dreams. She’s a mess who stays out all night clubbing and behaves bizarrely on dates. The last thing she needs is to be reminded of Glenn and his betrayal – but that’s what happens when he takes up a job at the camp.
The first of six episodes concludes explosively as Justine goes to the police and reveals that Glenn sexually assaulted her when he was her coach and she was just 16. He insists it’s a fantasy: she is projecting her resentment of him and anger about her misfortune on the court into these imagined crimes.
What follows is a complex game of he said, she said that is occasionally too confusing for its own good and cannot decide whether to make Justine sympathetic and plausible or headstrong and unreliable.
But the potentially messy story is kept on the straight and narrow by Turner and Hyland, who are searing in their scenes together. Even if you couldn’t tell a double fault from a double vodka, Fifteen-Love will keep you gripped.
