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In many ways, Reunion is a fairly conventional thriller. Daniel Brennan (Matthew Gurney) is released from prison after serving a long sentence for killing his childhood friend Ray (Ace Mahbaz). He confessed to the murder but has never explained why he did it. Brennan’s wife died when he was inside and he is now trying to reconnect with his daughter, Carly (Lara Peake), while seeking vengeance (also unexplained) on a figure from his past and putting himself in danger of being recalled to prison as he does so.
Beyond Brennan himself, we have Anne-Marie Duff as Ray’s widow, Christine, and Rose Ayling-Ellis as their daughter, Miri, whose fragile new life is hit hard by the news that the killer of their beloved husband and father is out on probation. Christine’s boyfriend, Stephen (Eddie Marsan), is a former police officer and promises to look out for them.
What sets Reunion apart is that it takes place at least equally – perhaps even primarily – in the world of Deaf people as in the hearing world. Brennan – and actor Gurney – are deaf from birth, as is Ayling-Ellis/Miri. The production is bilingual, moving between British Sign Language and spoken English. The script, by screenwriter William Mager, who is Deaf, incorporates many salient experiences that come with being without hearing in a society not set up for you, but never skates anywhere close to agitprop.
You can feel the waves of rage and frustration roll off Brennan as a prisoner who has been unable to sign – to communicate effectively – for the first six years of his sentence because no accommodations have been made for him. The intricacies of interpretation and the risk those dependent on it must take are clear. “Hang on,” says the BSL interpreter, when Brennan’s probation officer eventually remembers to book her for a meeting with her client’s Deaf parents: “One sign can mean two different things depending on context.” Are his parents trying to talk of their disappointment? Or regret? Imagine a lifetime full of such subtleties, of navigating potential slips and wonder where you would be. There is also a hugely touching moment when the tide of fury swamping Brennan’s troubled daughter – wounded by her mother’s death, her father’s incarceration and (as she sees it) her abandonment by her best friend, Miri, when they were 10 – first recedes, when her father calls her by name. “Long time since I’ve seen anyone sign ‘Carly’,” she says.
Hints of the underlying bond between the two boys and the cause of Brennan’s apparently murderous anger towards his friend one fateful night in the pub are given in fragmentary flashbacks, along with possible explanations of why he cannot provide Christine with the answers she desperately wants. Meanwhile, the goodwill extended to him by the probation officer, Anna (Olive Gray), as a result of her failure to provide the necessary interpreter (then the embarrassment of unthinkingly telling him she will call him to confirm his next appointment) is running out as he breaches more terms of his licence. Aggravating that situation is Stephen, who may not be the good guy he appears. Unsettled by his first sight of the late Ray – in a photo on Christine’s fridge – he begins to agitate for Brennan to be recalled. The question of what he has to hide runs alongside the question of what Brennan has to reveal.
The performances in Reunion are uniformly excellent (with the possible exception of Marsan’s Sheffield accent – but it’s likely that his presence helped the thing get off the ground, so we will cut the man’s odd vowel sounds some slack) and the seamlessness of Peake’s BSL dialogue had me checking to see whether she is a native speaker. Ayling-Ellis, thanks to her two-year stint as Frankie Lewis in EastEnders, is a known talent but Gurney is a revelation. He is an effortlessly compelling physical presence, but makes Brennan a mass of delicate layers – volatile, but wrapped in the frustrations of circumstance; a grieving widower longing to make up the loss to Carly; a man capable of being the father his damaged child needs but divided against himself by an unexorcised trauma; and a murderer? Maybe. That he has had to wait until now for a lead television role says at least as much about the blinkered, ungenerous world of unchallenged norms we live in as Reunion itself does.
