Mother's Day, BBC2 review: Powerful IRA drama avoids lecturing viewers

Anna Maxwell Martin and Daniel Mays offer nuanced performances as the parents of a 12-year-old victim of the Warrington bombings

The most haunting image in Mother’s Day (BBC2) was of the mortally wounded Tim Parry swaddled head-to-toe in bandages and suspended above a hospital bed, as if levitating. The camera didn’t linger but simply let the horror speak for itself. Nor was there any dwelling on the observation that his room smelt of burning, a result of the 1993 IRA Warrington bombings that would shortly afterwards claim the life of the 12-year-old, along with that of three year-old Jonathan Ball, killed instantly in the attack. Ball had been in town with his babysitter shopping for a Mother’s Day card.

The challenge writer Nick Leather (Broken) faced in this 90-minute drama was communicating the abhorrence of the bombings without sensationalising a real tragedy or exploiting the suffering of Parry, Ball and their families. He was assisted by powerfully nuanced performances by Anna Maxwell Martin and Daniel Mays as Tim Parry’s parents, and by a steely turn from Vicky McClure as Dublin mother Susan McHugh, whose campaign of protest against the IRA's savagery helped move the Northern Ireland conflict towards the Good Friday Agreement.

Left unsaid but very much implied was that this peace – always fragile – is now threatened by Brexit and the spectre of police and customs barriers running through what, just 25 years ago, was a war zone.

The form a reinstated border might take was hinted at as McHugh travelled north, through a heavily armed checkpoint, to bring her message of peace to Belfast. She was met with disbelief at what the conflict-hardened survivors of the Troubles regarded as her naivety in speaking out against Warrington. In one of the many scenes that spoke to the tremendous subtlety Leather brought to a complicated subject, a mother who had lost a child to the security forces in the North wondered why McHugh was helping create a hierarchy of victims, whereby a victim of the IRA in England was worth more than one killed by an RUC plastic bullet in Belfast.

Northern Ireland is a knot that refuses to be untangled. Mother’s Day did an effective job laying out the complexities of the Troubles, applying shades of grey to what is often portrayed as a black and white situation. This it achieved while also weaving a powerful human interest story as McHugh and the Parrys found a common cause in trying to ensure there would never be another Warrington (there of course would be – the Omagh bombing, carried out by IRA dissidents, was still five years away).

The only glaring flaw was McClure’s Irish accent, which had nothing in common with the real McHugh’s Dublin background and instead seemed to have parachuted in from a Hollywood movie about leprechauns and merry peasants in thatched cottages (it got better as she went on but initially she sounded like Mummy Zebra from Peppa Pig).

The soap opera elements, however, felt earned and respectful towards the real suffering of the families. As Tim lay dying, Colin Parry’s way of coping was to step before the cameras and urge peace. But Wendy, whose bottomless grief, Martin conveyed with understatement, just wanted to mourn her son.

Thus she initially regarded the appearance on her doorstep of the campaigning McHugh as a visitation from an amiable but slightly dodgy saleswoman. A cheaper drama would have framed the story around the relationship between these two mothers, one grieving, the other outraged at what the IRA had done ostensibly in the name of Irish freedom. And it might have insisted that a storybook ending had taken place when Wendy Parry travelled to Dublin, with her husband, and found a common cause with Susan.

Instead Leather let the facts speak for themselves, understanding this story of courage, selflessness and empathy was powerful enough on its own. The crescendo came as the Parrys appeared on television in Dublin, breaking the hearts of a nation as they explained that they did not blame Ireland for what had happened.

The most devastating was saved for last with a cut to footage of the real Susan McHugh, at a peace rally in Dublin, and of Wendy and Colin Parry going onto Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show. And then to a final shot of Tim Parry, smiling from a faded photograph, and the quiet yet insistent implication that, 25 years after his death, it is unthinkable anyone should wilfully reignite a conflict never really extinguished, merely reduced to a simmer. It also demonstrated that drama can tackle complex and difficult subjects without making the viewer feel as if has sat through a lecture.