After the Party

Five years before the series begins, Penny walked in on her husband Phil at a party in their house and saw something she took to be a sexual assault on a drunk teenage boy. She said so, to everyone. The boy said nothing happened. Phil said nothing happened. The marriage ended, the daughter took her father’s side, and Phil went home to Scotland. Now he is back in Wellington, and Penny has not changed her mind. Our verdict: this is a hard, intelligent six-part drama with a central performance we would put beside any on television, let down a little by a final episode that is tidier than the five before it.

Robyn Malcolm, who created the series with Dianne Taylor and plays Penny, is in nearly every scene and does not ask once to be liked. Penny is a biology teacher in her fifties who swims in the harbour in all weathers, says what she thinks to pupils, colleagues and strangers, and is right about a great deal of it. She is also exhausting, and the series knows it. Malcolm plays her with her jaw set and her shoulders up, a woman who has been told for five years that she is unreasonable and has decided the only reply is to be more so. When she is proved right about something small, the satisfaction on her face lasts half a second too long, and it costs her.

Peter Mullan plays Phil as a warm, tired, reasonable man, which is the only way the series could work. He is kind to his daughter Grace (Tara Canton), good with her baby, patient with Penny’s mother Joy (Catherine Wilkin), and he never protests too much. Mullan lets us like him and lets us notice that we are being allowed to. Ian Blackburn, as Ollie, now a young man with a life he would like to get on with, is quiet and wary, and his scenes with Malcolm are the ones we found hardest to watch. Elz Carrad does patient work as Tom, Grace’s partner, stuck between two in-laws who cannot be in a room together.

Peter Salmon directs all six episodes and keeps the camera close and the colour cold. Dave Cameron shoots Wellington in grey light, wind and sea spray, with Penny often small against a hillside or a harbour, and the party itself in short bursts of warm, blurred light that the series returns to again and again. Denise Haratzis cuts those returns so that each one gives us a few frames more, and a different detail, and never quite the one Penny needs. It is a plain device and it works: by the fourth episode we were watching the flashbacks as closely as she is.

We should say what the series did to us. In the third episode Penny corners Ollie and will not let him leave until he talks to her, and we wanted her to stop. We were on the side of everyone else present, telling her to drop it. Then the scene ended and we realised that this is how the people around Penny have felt for five years, and that the series had put us among them on purpose. We did not enjoy that. We admired it.

The writing, by Taylor, Martha Hardy-Ward, Emily Perkins and Samuel E. Shore, is careful never to tell us what happened at the party, and for five episodes it holds the line. The sixth takes a turn we will not describe. It is not a cheat, and it is well played, but some of what made the earlier episodes uncomfortable drains away in the last twenty minutes, and the series is a little less itself for it. We would have taken another episode of the discomfort instead.

A few smaller things. Dean O’Gorman’s Simon, who is fond of Penny and gets little thanks for it, is given more screen time than the writing has use for. The school scenes are the thinnest in the series, there mainly to give Penny somewhere to be wrong in public. Six episodes of 45 minutes is the right length; a second series would be a mistake.

Watch it over two or three nights rather than one. Penny is good company only in doses, which is rather the point. And if you have ever been the person at a dinner who would not drop it, this is an uncomfortable four and a half hours well spent.