TV Highlights: Masters at Quirke

Upon emerging from the deep, oddly seductive fog of your first 90 minutes with Quirke, one thought will linger on: why hasn’t this world been so explored on our screens before? A BBC/RTÉ three-parter based on the work of Benjamin Black (Booker Prize winner John Banville with his genre hat on), it follows the titular, troubled Dublin pathologist as he uncovers dark family secrets in 1950s Ireland.

Yet, as much as Gabriel Byrne shines – in a typically downcast manner – along with an impressive cast, perhaps the biggest player is the capital city itself. Capturing a haunted, foreboding beauty, Dublin in those despairing old times seems a tailormade backdrop for cinematic art. One of the stars of Quirke, formidable character actor Nick Dunning (The Tudors, The Iron Lady, Alexander), feels like they’ve tapped into something special.

“It really is Raymond Chandler-esque,” he says of the city’s portrayal. “This whole thing of the rain, the darkness. Street lamps and oil on water. It’s very atmospheric.”

Dunning, a London-born performer who's excelled on stage, television and in cinema, has called Dalkey his home for over a decade. “Irish culture is so different from English culture. Particularly Irish culture from the ‘50s. To me, it’s a bit like film noir. The whole idea of ‘it’s coming around the corner’. What’s coming? We don’t know.

“I’ve noticed the way Scandinavians are promoting ‘Nordic noir’; Wallender and all those shows. I keep thinking, ‘why don’t we do that here’? Why don’t we make ‘Celtic noir’?”

This is our first taste. With two further episodes still to air, Quirke finds Gabriel Byrne delving into a world of all too familiar cover-ups, as young girls enter laundries, babies go missing and the pathologist must confront his adopted family.

Byrne has talked openly about growing up in this Dublin, calling it an “almost Taliban-esque society.” And he revealed how he himself was abused as a young boy. He confessed last year that filming Quirke was like “crashing into the past”.

Played with superb understatement by Dunning, the peculiar Malachy Griffin is straight- laced to the point of being in a societal straitjacket. Central to the show is Quirke’s relationship with this peculiar brother-in-law. Was Dunning aware of the impact filming had on his co-star?

“Absolutely. It was a very extraordinary thing for him. There was a hospital scene we shot round the back in the National Concert Hall. At one point, Gabriel took me to one side and said: ‘I used to go into this room!’ Really bizarre. It used to be UCD, where he went to university. It was extraordinary n the sense that there was this journey that he was going on that the character was going on as well. A privileged moment to hear all that. Touching.”

Byrne was just one of the names that had Dunning immediately jumping at the chance to get involved.

“If someone says to you ‘Gabriel Byrne, John Banville, Andrew Davies and Conor MacPherson (screenwriters) and John Alexander (director)?' You go ‘yep!’ – there’s no hanging back there at all.”

He points to how young actress Aisling Franciosi “sparkles with this extraordinary intelligence.” And he shares his delight at working with the iconic Michael Gambon for the second time.

“Gambon is still, to this day, one of my heroes. Growing up, I remember going to see him do King Lear. It was absolutely extraordinary. No one has ever moved me the way he does. There were four of us in the room (for the 2008 production of Pinter’s No Man’s Land). I’m going, ‘Oh my God, I’m a quarter of this!’ It was a fantastic experience.

“I’ve been lucky enough to work with a few legends. It’s really weird when you start realising that they’re just people. You get there with all this baggage in your head: how she's this extraordinary goddess or whatever. I remember when we did The Iron Lady, talking to Meryl Streep about things. I’m sitting there going, ‘Oh my God, she did this and that’ and she’s asking you what you put in the packed lunch for your daughter.”

It was Dunning’s first time working with Byrne. “He’s steeped in legend as well,” he notes. “’Uh oh, Miller’s Crossing, The Usual Suspects!’ He does have a seriousness about him. But every now and again this very cheeky thing comes out and he’ll crack you up. All I’m saying is that there was a moment where Aisling, myself and Gabriel all put on black-rimmed glasses and did old-school comedian Harry Worth!”

Given the depth of its ambition, and its themes and topics that trace the troubled psyche of post-independence Ireland, Dunning dearly hopes Quirke connects with the people. “There are so many boils that still need to be lanced. It’s healthy.”

We return to the question of why it's taken so long. “What tends to happen is that whenever there’s a tragedy or some monstrous event, it takes a while until people have enough courage to even mention it. We’ve seen so much of it recently, with people being paid back by the State. That’s correct, that’s the natural process. I do think we’re part of that. It’s important – the role of art in the life of a country.”