Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Charlene Mckenna, Barry Ward, Aiden McCann, Rhys Mannion, Katelyn Rose Downey, Jeanne Nicole Ni Áinle, Adam Fergus, Aoibheann McCann, Nathara Dayananda, Grace Collender, Cathy Belton, Benjamin Bergin, Robert Mitchell, Kevin Trainor, Orla Casey, Trevor Kaneswaran, Roisin Rankin, Ray Weafer, Sean Duggan, Joe Rooney, Oscar Nolan, Youssef Quinn, Tristan Heanue, Breffni Clack, Steve Gunn, Maeron Libomi, Niall Bishop, Bernadette Carty, Fergus Mulligan.
How far we go to erase our part in a moral and societal transgression is purely at the conscious of our very being. This is especially true when we commit murder to cover up a murder.
By its own place in human history, we look upon the act of taking a life as being the ultimate sin against another person, and as we come to terms with what have been as the life of that soul bleeds out, we are left with a choice, with an option…come clean, or run and hide in the shadows for the rest of your life, changing your name, letting go of all that you once were, never having again the opportunity to live a life without looking over your shoulder, never betraying a moment in which your life can come to a shuddering stop.
The six-part series Clean Sweep, which thrusts the talented Charlene Mckenna and Barry Ward to the fore as husband and wife, highlights the dangers of believing that the past will never catch up with us just because we have reinvented our name, changed the details of where we were when the body was found.
What makes Clean Sweep an intriguing piece of drama is its setting, the middle-class sense of comfortable illusion to which Shelly Mohan, (Charlene Mckenna) has managed to ease herself into despite being a drug mule two decades before. Nobody knows her, nobody remembers her from before, all that there is the respectability of being married to an officer of the law, three children and having the kind of life, which is fine, hard, often difficult, but not one which you would swap with someone to whom the world has been searching for, to place cuffs upon and throw in jail for a sinister crime.
This daring thriller portrays the feeling of being hemmed into a corner whilst all the time continuing the illusion, that the family life you have created is a truth, and that the one that died at your hands was an inconvenience to erase, with a subtly that to be fair really could only be carried of by someone of Ms. McKenna’s considerable art and talent.
Whilst the subject is something we will never hopefully have to deal with, to understand fear as our carefully constructed world falls apart is to know the lie we place within ourselves. Written with elegance and style, and with an undercurrent of subterfuge of each character, Clean Sweep is be admired for its take on the study of deception.
Ian D. Hall