Low-key and charming
‘My Mother and Other Strangers’ warms up to a WWII village in N. Ireland.
Simpler times aren’t all that simple in Masterpiece’s “My Mother and Other Strangers,” a World War IIera drama set in rural Northern Ireland that offers equal doses of nostalgia and realism.
The five-part British series, which premieres Sunday on PBS, captures life in the small fishing community of Moybeg, where 4,000 American troops have been stationed, disrupting the way things have been done for decades if not centuries.
Planes now roar above Lough Neagh daily, disturbing fishermen who catch eel for a living. Local farmers on push bikes share the muddy lanes with military jeeps.
Village girls are dating GIs, infuriating the Irishmen of this fictional village.
And war rations just don’t measure up to the U.S. Army’s delicacies of canned corned beef and Lucky Strike cigarettes.
No one feels the tension more than the Coyne family, pillars of the once-insulated community.
They own the pub where everyone — locals and soldiers, merchants and fishermen — meet.
They also run the rations store, where black-market goods stolen from the American air base keep turning up.
And they have an innocent, 16-year-old daughter, Emma (Eileen O’Higgins), whose rosy cheeks and doelike eyes are a GI beacon.
The story is told by the Coynes’ son, Francis (Michael Nevin), who was 10 in 1943. Now an old man, Francis is the off-screen narrator whose recollections serve as a framing device for each episode.
The star is Francis’ English mother, head school mistress Rose Coyne (Hattie Morahan). She happens to be the wisest and strongest presence in the patriarchal village, where men revere and resent her.
She’s married Irishman Michael (Owen McDonnell) and helps run all their local businesses, but as an Englishwoman, she’s never quite fit in thanks to an inherent provincialism and strained relations between Catholic Northern Ireland and England.
The resilient Rose has coped just fine, however, until she connects with another outsider, American liaison officer Capt. Dreyfuss (Aaron Staton, Ken from “Mad Men”). He reminds her of the worldliness, culture and tenderness she’s been missing.
The pacing in “My Mother and Other Strangers” is slow, and the story is sprawling, encompassing several subplots: a boy’s coming of age, a girl’s budding romance, a soldier’s story, villagers entrenched in the age-old issues of class disparity.
Down to its framing device of an off-screen narrator, “Mother” is similar in style to “Call the Midwife,” another British production set in the shadow of WWII.
Women in frayed-but-tidy fitted wool jackets and skirts ride push bikes against a gray sky. Men in high-waisted military uniforms and local tweed attire sip stout in smoky pubs. Resourceful kids turn anything into a toy (a tin can, an old dishrag).
They all muddle through thin times with the help of one another.
It is a different country, however, so there are variations on themes.
For instance, no one in Moybeg uses the “Midwife” phrase “tickety boo!” (I know, so disappointing). But they do introduce another bit of WWII, across-the-pond slang that’s almost as delightful.
When Emma spills water on her book or finds herself in a tight spot, she curses, “Knickers!”
Aside from those spicy moments, “My Mother and Other Strangers” can be, like the village it’s set in, too lowkey at times. But what it lacks in excitement, it makes up for in warmth and charm.
It’s a welcome escape, and not because the era was a simpler time. It’s because it was more confusing; a time of change. That is surely a premise we can all relate to right now.
And if not, you know what to say: knickers!