LINCK AND MULHAHN Hampstead, N1

A TALE FOR TODAY FROM A PRUSSIAN PAST

Right here’s a love story, an idyll of 18c Prussia: Corporal Anastasius Linck, a Hanoverian musketeer in dashing white breeches and glossy buttons is espied from a window by the beautiful, undowered however extraordinarily bored and rebellious Catharina Mulhahn. Our hero is compelled to abandon the regiment and flee underneath the assumed identify of Rosenstengel to work as a cloth-monger and dyer, since a medical examination for the clap would have revealed that he’s born a lady. However love should have its manner, and finds its idyll in a garret till an outraged mom of the bride and the clumping simplicities of a bygone penal code meet up with them, comically however lethally.

There’s nothing new about folks stepping exterior the tiresome social conventions laid down for the physique they had been born with. Throughout cultures and down historical past there have been many characters forceful sufficient both to dwell as the alternative intercourse, or to declare themselves as the present trendy line has it “nonbinary”: one thing past and completely different.

We hear a lot of the males, particularly their persecution in cultures which currently included our personal, however maybe not sufficient of the ladies: amazons and navy maids, women who ran off to be pirates, sailors , troopers. Some tales are of following a lover – like Candy Polly Oliver or Leonora in Fidelio – some simply wished journey and had been – as many people have been – resentful of feminine limitation. Others had been lesbian and fell in love with women. Of these feminine lovers, some knew completely properly what was happening beneath their dashing companions’ breeches, others seemingly not. And definitely stiffly standard societies like 18c Prussia most popular to imagine such wives had been dupes. So that is the spine of an interesting story which evokes a playful tragicomedy from Ruby Thomas, who has already dazzled us twice downstairs on this theatre which discovers new writers and tends them properly.

She discovered the story of Linck and Mulhahn in a 1722 account of the courtroom case which condemned each – “him” to demise, her to jail needlework and exile. With director Owen Horsley and a few enlivening bursts of recent disco she goes at it playfully, in a clear stark summary set which turns into barracks, bar, house, garret and at last courtroom. It’s at occasions gloriously humorous, typically deeply touching within the portrait of their transient home fulfilment. Maggie Bain is superb, crop-haired and swashbucklingly boyish as a soldier, grave and troubled in moments of unease on the harmful social unacceptability of their love.Helena Wilson as Catharina is a likeable hoyden, clashing with a fabulously drawn Lucy Black as her mom, a mistress of pass-ag petit-point who’s finally roused to terrified hysteria on the hazard of the state of affairs.

The lengthy first act is a delight, sharp and credible and humorous, with a bit an excessive amount of young-intellectual chat about Locke and Liebnitz, however actual coronary heart. After the interval they’re in courtroom, and Thomas’ reward for uproarious comedy this time is lavished on Kammy Darweish’s bored previous decide and the pious prosecutor and doddering defence. Mom’s panicked proof is sweet, and the first rate fellow-soldier Johann – who at all times knew, however revered a fellow-warrior feminine or not – provides to the sense of how absurd it was, and nonetheless is, for legislation to intervene in non-public love of any sort.

At which level I hoped that this sense of absurdity and celebration of numerous methods of being would lead our creator on to some timeless, and nonetheless playful, ending. Alas, it was to not be: it goes literal ,and heavyset preachy. A touching however overdone final jail parting is adopted by a scaffold speech too far, and the hammering of a message that “even when I’m completed away with , these like me will stay” . Then a contemporary couple in dungarees and t shirt meet in a theatre now to “weave their very own story” of ardour and struggling. Till these final ten minutes I used to be cheering. It pale a bit, killed a mouse beneath, however Ruby Thomas is completely one to observe , its a very good night, and I’ll comply with each play in her future.

My solely quibble is the exhausting insistence within the playscript that Linck must not ever be performed by a “cis heterosexual male or feminine”. If one other playwright dominated to exclude homosexual actors, think about the row. If particular person privateness in sexual love is sacred, let it stay so.

field workplace hampsteadtheatre.com to 4 march