Conversations with Friends
BBC THREE
Following its wildly popular adaptation of Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People a couple of years ago, the BBC has now dramatised her first, Conversations with Friends. Dusting down Philip Larkin’s observation that sex began in 1963, one might wonder if Rooney has given the subject some new paintwork for the 2020s. Or has she? The first episode of Conversations with Friends (15 May with all episodes now streaming on iPlayer) suggests that all the main themes of romantic love narratives are thoroughly in their traditional place: desiring, falling, courting and betrayal.
Rooney’s characters are interestingly bland or perhaps blandly interesting. At any rate, they appear to make a virtue of “normality” whereas in fact they have aspirations to a “specialness” they appear to view as an entitlement. The dialogue is almost aggressively monosyllabic, casual, everyday. People mutter and mumble and drift about, lobbing in occasional statements about being bisexual or communist. It could simply be dull but Rooney (who wrote the screenplay) pulls it off – just about.
