TV review: Conversations with Friends — Sally Rooney and Lenny Abrahamson know what it feels like to fancy the arse off someone

Cork-born actress Alison Oliver is achingly credible in the part and Conversations with Friends is a stunning watch, mainly because we’ve all been there

Melissa (Jemima Kirke), Bobbi (Sasha Lane), Frances (Alison Oliver), Nick (Joe Alwyn). Images: Element Pictures/Enda Bowe,Enda Bowe

Sally Rooney and Lenny Abrahamson know what it feels like to fancy the arse off someone.

It’s what made her writing and his direction of Normal People addictive for so many people. Forget the privilege and the nice houses and the Dublin-ness of it all. We’ve all felt like this and they know how to recreate the feeling, on the page and on-screen.

Abrahamson, along with screenwriter Alice Birch, has done it again and then some in the adaptation of Rooney’s latest book, Conversations with Friends, (RTÉ One, Wednesdays 9:35pm and RTÉ Player). This time the focus is on two friends — Frances and Bobbi — who live in a Dublin that is once more centred around Trinity College. (You’d nearly feel sorry for UCD.) The two women get caught up in a love-rectangle I’d guess you’d call it, where the other two sides are made up of married couple, Melissa and Nick. She’s an in-demand writer, he’s an actor.

The focus is on friends Frances and Bobbi, played by Alison Oliver and Sasha Lane.

Frances falls for Nick, Bobbi snogs Melissa. They feel like the well-matched couples in the foursome. Bobbi and Melissa are self-assured, sharp, the big beasts in the room. Frances and Nick are reserved, coy, and self-deprecating. The dinner between the four of them in the obligatory elegant Victorian house in south Dublin is a masterpiece. Bobbi and Melissa flirt and talk over the guests in their eagerness to impress each other. Frances and Nick are all awkward pauses and apologies across the table, delighted when Bobbi and Melissa go outside for a smoke. You’re willing them to get it on, the way you’d push your two friends into a slow dance at a 1980s disco.

What makes it more interesting is that we care about Frances, and we’re not sure about Nick. Is he really that shy and humble, or does he act like this for all the girls? She’s foolish for him, but we have no way of knowing if he feels the same, at least not in the first two episodes.

Frances falls for Nick, played by Joe Alwyn.

Frances is our focus because we see her at home, in rural Ireland, where her Dad is eye-poppingly portrayed by Tommy Tiernan, tired with life, half-pissed and benevolent, stretched out on the couch in his grimy bachelor pad, watching as Marty Morrissey commentates on a game. It makes you realise how under-used Tiernan was in Derry Girls. He can act.

I had zero high hopes for Conversations with Friends. The book wasn’t my thing, peppered with over-long emails about Marxism. (I loved the Normal People book.)

Pictured: Alison Oliver as Frances. 

Thankfully the writers here copped on that emails about Marxism might be a let-down for fans of Normal People on the telly. It barely registers here, save a funny, telling moment where Frances tells Nick that’s she a communist, but never acts on it. It’s funny because of the delivery — the Cork born actress Alison Oliver is achingly credible in the part, she’s only getting started judging by this performance.

They’re all good. Conversations with Friends is a stunning watch, mainly because we’ve all been there.