MOTHER COURAGE (THE WOMAN IN THE WALL)

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Right from the opening image of cattle surrounding a lady in her nightdress on a damp, rural Irish road, you immediately sense how much of a tightrope Joe Murtagh's six part television miniseries 'The Woman In The Wall' is walking.

Murtagh's drama takes on one of the grimmest episodes in the history of the Irish Catholic Church - the exploitation of pregnant young women in mother and baby homes - and crafts a psychological thriller around it.

There's a risk in handling such a sensitive subject in this way that Murtagh and his directors Harry Woodlif and Rachna Suri could make a real haims of an issue that is still raw for many people.

Unfortunately that nagging concern never really goes away throughout the run of this imaginative BBC1 drama.

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'The Woman In The Wall' isn't the first TV show to take a tough real life issue and address it through the medium of a thriller.

Before he penned his moving TV film 'Hillsborough,' Jimmy McGovern addressed the trauma of the 1989 Liverpool FC disaster in the stunning 'To Be Somebody' episode of his hit ITV crime series 'Cracker' with Robbie Coltrane and Robert Carlyle.

The bitter political divisions of the 1984-85 miners strike informed James Graham's gripping six part Nottinghamshire murder mystery 'Sherwood' on BBC1 last year with David Morrissey and Alun Armstrong.

For three series, Sally Wainwright's 'Happy Valley' also touched on deprivation, drug addiction and family dysfunction in a Yorkshire community that has seen better days.

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So you can see why a writer like Murtagh might spot the potential for a thriller that could cloak a hard hitting issue like the separation of babies from their mothers in Catholic Church run institutions.

'The Woman In The Wall' is fashioned around Lorna Brady, Ruth Wilson's haunted character who is the woman we see waking up among the cattle on the country road.

Lorna has a tendency to sleepwalk - a condition developed as a result of the trauma of having been forced to live and work in a Magdalene Laundry.

Incarcerated as a pregnant 15 year old, she has gone on to become a seamstress but is suffering the trauma of not only having her child taken away from her by priests and nuns but of being forced to work in brutal conditions.

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Regarded as a bit of an oddball by her neighbours in the village of Kilkinure, Lorna is nevertheless approached by Philippa Dunne's Niamh to join a group of mothers who also had their children taken away from them and are lobbying the Catholic Church and the Irish Government to acknowledge how much they were maltreated.

Lorna is rattled, though, when she also receives a note from someone claiming to know what became of the baby she gave birth to.

She's visited by its author, Fiona Bell's Aoife but is later shocked to discover the woman dead in her home.

Panicking and believing she might have been responsible, Lorna buries the corpse in the living room wall of her home.

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Another connection to her hometown and its mother and baby home has also died.

Stephen Brennan's Father Percy Sheehan's body has been found in suspicious circumstances in his parochial house.

Daryl McCormack's Detective Colman Akande is assigned from Dublin to the case.

However it emerges Colman knew the victim and was adopted from a Catholic run institution by Chizzy Akoludu's Lola Akande and her family.

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When a car that may have been involved in the suspicious death of the priest is found in a field outside Kilkinure, Colman starts to ask awkward questions in the community unnerving Simon Delaney's easygoing local Garda Sergeant Aidan Massey.

Lorna's strange behaviour, though, makes her a person of interest in the investigation - especially when the car is torched after being recovered from the field.

The sudden appearance of Ardal O'Hanlon's Dara, Aoife's husband, also raises uncomfortable questions that stir up terrible and terrifying memories for Lorna and Colman.

But did Lorna really murder Aoife?

The first thing to say about 'The Woman In The Wall' is that it is a very well made psychological thriller.

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Harry Woodlif and Rachna Suri do a good job amping up the Gothic horror elements of Murtagh's ambitious script.

It is beautifully shot and lit by cinematographers Si Bell and Steven Cameron Ferguson and is impressively edited by Alastair Reid, Tom Chapman and Iain Kitching.

The miniseries also boasts a wonderfully creepy organ score by David Holmes and Brian Irvine, with some smartly chosen needle drops from the likes of The Cocteau Twins, Irish country singer Philomena Begley, Rory Gallagher, Can, Grian Chatten, Suicide, Horslips and Sinead O'Connor.

The use of O'Connor's previously unreleased 'The Magdalene Song' is especially affecting.

At times, though, Murtagh's drama wobbles as it navigates the tightrope of taking its grim subject matter and turning it into a nerve jangling David Fincher style thriller.

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In early episodes, you fear Wilson's character could become a bit of a stereotype - a sweary, traumatised Irishwoman outraged at her appalling treatment at the hands of the Catholic Church.

Eventually, though, it settles down as Murtagh and Wilson get her character under control.

There are much bigger flaws, however, including the way the audience is asked to swallow Colman's involvement in the investigation given his personal connection to the murdered priest.

Surely he would recuse himself from the investigation given the circumstances? Or do they not do that sort of thing in Dublin?

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Later when the body of Aoife disappears from Lorna's home, the reason given for this vanishing act feels too convenient and too much of a stretch.

The biggest problem for Murtagh's show, though, is that for much of its run you suspect the writer and the directors are too focussed on impressively executing the tropes of the psychological thriller at the expense of the hard hitting story at the core of the show.

Great care is taken to turn it into a Gothic psychological thriller.

But the bag of tricks they deploy runs the risk of distracting viewers from the real horror at the show's heart - the callous treatment of young women by a church that ought to have known and behaved better.

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Nevertheless 'The Woman in The Wall' is made watchable by impressive visuals and spirited performances from some in the cast.

Wilson's performance grows as the miniseries wears on.

At first it feels gimmicky as she trots out her ranting, haunted, abused Irishwoman routine.

However it starts to get really interesting as Lorna actually focuses on what happened to her baby.

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Wilson has always been a smart actress and her handling of Lorna's mental health is both subtle and smart.

McCormack, though, delivers the star turn with a performance fuelled by Colman's nightmares about his past, mounting anger, impatience and gritty determination.

Dunne is effective as a woman who wants to do a good thing for her neighbours by righting a wrong but who is straying naively into territory where their concerns could be exploited.

Hilda Fay catches the audience's eye as Amy Kane, a woman deeply damaged by her time in the mother and baby home.

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Dermot Crowley is excellent as the liaison between the women's group, the church and the state.

Mark Huberman is effective too as an old classmate of Lorna's.

Delaney, though, is handed a stock role of the lazy small town Garda sergeant that we have seen in countless Irish films and TV dramas and he does little fresh with it.

Brennan, Frances Tomelty as the hard hearted Sister Eileen and Aoibhinn McGinnity as her younger version also follow to the letter the villainous clergy playbook we have seen in many films and TV shows in the past two decades.

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It's good to see Ardal O'Hanlon stretching himself as an actor in a serious role - although he doesn't quite convince as Aoife's twitchy husband.

The problem is he just lacks sufficient menace when he's trying to be menacing.

Barry McGovern is also oddly stiff in a brief cameo in a later episode.

Ultimately, the overall impression of 'The Woman In The Wall' is of a drama that ironically is a bit of a curate's egg.

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While the thriller genre may help drive home the horror of what happened to some viewers outside Ireland who are unfamiliar with all the details of the mother and baby homes scandal, there are pluses and minuses to this approach.

When measured against Peter Mullan's hard hitting 2002 film 'The Magdalene Sisters' or Stephen Frears' 2013 movie 'Philomena,' Murtagh's treatment of the story loses some of its edge by being less direct.

It definitely pales when compared to Sinead O'Shea's remarkable documentary earlier this year 'Pray For Us Sinners' which showed real resistance in a small Irish town to the Church's maltreatment of young mothers.

But if it helps people to reflect on a dark stain on the history of the Irish state and the Church that dominated it for decades, then that's a good thing.

The mother and baby scandal is one of those moments in Irish history that people on both sides of the border should never forget.

Stories about the scandal still need to be told but if they are told through drama, they must be told with great care.

Murtagh's drama, unfortunately, just falls short.

('The Woman in the Wall' was broadcast on BBC1 in the UK between August 27-September 24, 2023)