4 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
T
he BBC’s adaptation of
Sally Rooney’s novel
Normal People was one
of the biggest successes
in the corporation’s
modern history. Within
a week of its release it
had been streamed 21.8 million times. By
the end of the year it had been streamed
62.7 million times.
It was the most popular show on iPlayer
in 2020 and the most popular show yet
released on BBC3, despite BBC3 being, at
the time, just a website, not a television
channel. In the space of a few weeks the
show’s male lead, Paul Mescal, who played
Connell Waldron, went from being an
anonymous fan of the singer Phoebe
Bridgers to being her boyfriend.
At this point it doesn’t really matter
whether critics like a show or not, al-
though, for the record, they did and used
the sorts of phrases directors mutter to
themselves in their daydreams: “a triumph
in every way”; “gorgeous and melancholy”.
Normal People also triggered what from
certain angles appeared to be a worldwide
psychosexual awakening as the melan-
choly love story and very long and detailed
sex scenes drove locked-down citizens
across the globe into frenzies of nostalgia
and lust.
Minute details of the show became cul-
tural totems. For instance, in Normal
People Connell wears a plain silver neck
chain, a detail that would not ordinarily
have provoked much comment, but this
was Normal People. An article in Vice
about the neck chain (“I would quite
willingly trade in my physical body to
become Connell’s chain”) went viral.
A piece in Metro purported to ana-
lyse the “science” of the neck chain
(“the neck is a place of intimacy
and trust”). An Instagram account
consisting solely of pictures of the
neck chain acquired more than
150,000 followers.
When the show’s director,
Lenny Abrahamson, was accosted
in the street by “some bloke showing
me his silver chain and giving me
the thumbs-up”, he understood immed-
iately that in the fervid atmosphere
of 2020 this was the universally
recognised gesture for “I am a fan of
Normal People”.
Abrahamson, 55 and no stranger to
acclaim (having directed such fêted
films as What Richard Did), is a bald Irish
man in spectacles. Speaking to him on
Zoom, I notice that the wallpaper in a cor-
ner of his living room is peeling. He has
Jones, who played Marianne in Normal
People might be the twin of pale, dark-
haired Alison Oliver, who plays Frances
in Conversations with Friends. Oliver is a
newcomer, a recent graduate of the Lir
National Academy of Dramatic Art at
Trinity College (Mescal’s alma mater).
Although it is a mark of the dramatically
elevated prestige of Rooney adaptations
that whereas Mescal found a pop star
girlfriend only after Normal People
launched him to fame, Oliver’s co-star Joe
Alwyn, who plays Nick, is already dating
Taylor Swift.
Oliver and Alwyn’s relationship lacks
the passionate certainty of the Connell/
Marianne romance, which, as Abraham-
son says, was “the engine” of Normal
People. “You’re always wondering where
Connell and Marianne are in relation to
each other — and if they’re not together
you feel that must be coming and you want
it to come.” Normal People was character-
ised by an atmosphere of monotone emo-
tional intensity. In Conversations with
Friends the tone is complicated by the
two extroverts. Jemima Kirke, who played
Jessa in Lena Dunham’s Girls, is wonder-
fully cast as Melissa: boho posh, brisk andinvolved, awkward and sensitive. Bobbi is
charismatic, overbearing and meddling. At
a poetry event, they meet a wealthy, older
couple: Melissa, a writer, and her husband,
Nick, a B-list actor. “I’m gay and Frances is
a communist,” Bobbi tells them. Bobbi de-
velops a crush on Melissa and sensitive,
taciturn Frances embarks on an affair with
Nick, who is also sensitive and taciturn but
in a smouldering, intense way. There is a
high-stakes, bed-swapping holiday in Cro-
atia. A sort of ménage à quatre develops.
Conversations with Friends is more
complex than Normal People and, as Abra-
hamson says, “colder”. Asked to pick a
favourite, he says diplomatically that
although “the initial pleasure of reading
Normal People is hard to beat”, he prefers
Conversations with Friends because “it’s
more complex and rewards thought and
re-reading”.
An obvious danger for a director ap-
proaching Conversations with Friends is
its similarity to Normal People: wan Irish
students failing to communicate their feel-
ings in Dublin and abroad. Abrahamson
admits that there is “definitely a family
resemblance between Frances and Mari-
anne”. Pale, dark-haired Daisy Edgar-cover story
Sex, angst, Dublin:
Sally Rooney is
back on television
The Normal People novelist’s first book has been adapted by
the same director. James Marriott asks him what we can expect
just finished post-production on a new tel-
evision adaptation of Rooney’s first novel,
Conversations with Friends. For in the
aftermath of the Normal People phenome-
non, no sane TV production company
would fail to commission Abrahamson to
make more Rooney adaptations.
He tells me he watched the success of
Normal People with “a feeling of unreality”.
He was stuck in the middle of lockdown,
but “every time I looked around that time,
everyone seemed to be talking about Nor-
mal People”. The ubiquity of neck chain
think-pieces made him go, “Wow. When
people really like something they con-
sume it and gnaw the bones.”
Rooney, he says guardedly, was pleased
that “people who loved the novel also
loved the adaptation”. She was closely
involved in Normal People, working on the
script with Alice Birch and as an executive
producer, but much less present with
Conversations with Friends because she
was “really deep into writing her next
novel” and therefore left the screenplay to
Birch. Rooney gave her views on castingchoices and participated in the initial divi-
sions of the book into separate episodes,
but never appeared on set. She has seen
Conversations with Friends, though, and
was “really positive about the results”.
Her absence shows perhaps in the
dialogue, which is less taut than in
Normal People and tends more
towards cliché.
Normal People was Rooney’s
second book, but feels like a debut.
Its plot is more straightforward and
its characterisation less complicat-
ed. The lovers Connell and Mari-
anne — as the book’s critics some-
times complain — are extremely
hot, extremely clever and extremely
politically aware students.
Both are fundamentally decent
people periodically separated by their
often-baffling emotional inarticulacy,
but the novel derives much of its force
from the simplicity of the scenario.
In Conversations with Friends Frances
and Bobbi are former high school lovers,
now university friends, who perform spo-
ken-word poetry together. Both are sub-
tly characterised and capable of being
wonderfully obnoxious. Frances is self-When people really
like something
they consume it
and gnaw the bones
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Lenny Abrahamson,
the director of Normal
People and Conversations
with Friends