Conversations With Friends, first look review: If anything it’s superior to Normal People

Along with Tiger King, Sally Rooney became our spiritual guide during the early months of the lockdown, when Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of her boy-meets-girl bestseller Normal People salved our pandemic woes.

Covid continues to cast a shadow as Abrahamson returns to the Rooney-verse, with a meditative retelling of her 2017 debut, Conversation With Friends, filmed in a Dublin conspicuously lacking in people, so that it looks like a place half-abandoned and suffering through a nuclear winter of the soul. It comes to BBC Three this Sunday and to RTÉ One on Wednesday May 18th.

The capital’s icy emptiness is far from a deal-breaker, however. If anything it speaks to the chilly distance between author and characters that characterised the book, about two college friends drawn into a troubling love quadrangle with a dashing married couple.

As with Normal People, Abrahamson astutely locates the visual poetry threaded through Rooney’s unadorned prose. He achieves this with auteur-ish shots of Bobbi (Sasha Lane) and Frances (Alison Oliver) taking the Dart to their new friends’ house in Monkstown or wandering the apocalyptic streets of Dublin at peak Covid (many of the interior scenes were filmed in Belfast).

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If anything Conversation With Friends is dramatically superior to Normal People, which fell into talking points when it came to matters of class in Ireland (dialogue about privilege and wealth felt like the sort of speechifying encountered in the student debating societies where Rooney discovered the gut-punch power of language).

Conversations With Friends is different in that it shows rather than tells, as Frances and Bobbi become dangerously enamoured with their new pals Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Melissa (Jemima Kirke).

In 2022, it's hard to imagine a time Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, Normal People's starry leads, were anything other than super-famous. But both were unknowns going into a series that made them overnight sensations (such was their celebrity, at one point former Kildare footballer Mescal turned GAA shorts into a fashion item).

A similar sense of the big time beckoning attends Conversation With Friends’ Oliver, a 22-year-old Cork actress who’d just bagged a job waitressing when cast by Abrahamson.

Bobbi, who becomes an American in the adaptation, is played by Lane with equal assuredness. Alas, the same cannot be said of Alwyn whose Nick is the sort of upper-middle class, Dart-line trendy who you just know has unyielding views about parking in the Phoenix Park and isn’t afraid to tweet them far and wide.

Having inspired girlfriend Taylor Swift’s most toe-curling song (London Boy) Alwyn now further blots his copybook with a wonky accent that, much like the soccer career of Jack Grealish, starts Irish and ends up English. Rogue brogue aside, his lack of charisma is a void at the heart of Conversations With Friends. And try as he might, Abrahamson – to paraphrase Tay-Tay – cannot shake it off.

Irish viewers will find it hard to be neutral about Conversations With Friends. The novelty of seeing the textures of everyday life – a Dart station in the rain, Frances taking the train home to Ballinasloe, Tommy Tiernan (playing her dead-beat dad) watching Marty Morrissey on RTÉ – are simply too much to get over. And so, many of us will be engulfed by Conversations With Friends as surface-level experience, nodding at familiar landmarks and along to a soundtrack that opens with Dublin/Meath pop singer CMAT.

But even with those lenses removed it feels more substantial than Normal People. In particular, the sex scenes lack that weird, exhibitionary prudishness that were a hallmark of the earlier drama (Mescal, in particular, seemed permanently on the brink of tears whenever required to get his kit off).

Rooney fans will lap it up. For everyone else, the wow factor of a prestige television take on Dublin – albeit empty and lockdown-grim – is sure to bring is own pleasures too.