Linck and Mulhahn, Hampstead Theatre
***
Ruby Thomas' tragi-comic love story recovers a pair of Queer lives from 18th Century court records of an illicit marriage between a young woman and a Prussian army deserter assigned female at birth.
Without the trial (for sodomy among other things), their existence would be lost, and there are contemporary echoes here in the lawyerly struggle to articulate acts based on rigid gender definitions.
The records suggest Anastasius Linck's life was messier, more chaotic and brutal than Thomas' cleaned up version, which finds hope and humour in a gleefully anachronistic tale about individuals staying true to themselves in a society threatened by their very existence.
'Neither man nor woman,' Linck is an accomplished swordsman and pleaser of women, but when faced with a medical examination, they flee the army to sell cloth in Mulhahn's small town. Against their better judgement they fall for her spiky charms. Witty verbal sparring gives way to passion and love in a tiny garrett where they share domestic chores and debate gender roles.
Owen Horsley directs with verve, but doesn't always marshal the tonal dissonance of corsets and harpschichords, slang and courtly speech, flicking V signs and Sex Pistols tunes - perhaps obviously signalling the revolutionary nature of Linck and Mulhahn's relationship.
There's fun to be had in the behind-closed-doors tedium of respectable, peniless womanhood between Helena Wilson's feisty, unruly Mulhahn and her terminally disappointed mother (Lucy Black).
Whores, maids, wives or spinsters is the choice that Linck evades for risky barracks life, and a reminder of what a bum deal the gender binary is for women.
Maggie Bain movingly charts Linck's journey from hyper vigilance and flinty self-protection to trembling trust, finally revealing their body to Mulhahn in a tender bath scene - just at the moment of arrest.
But the piece comes unstuck in the farcical court scene which undermines Linck's tragedy and nobility as a gender martyr, a clumsy framing device, and overegged ending gifts 18th Century characters the vision to predict today's more accepting society. A litle restraint, and greater precision between elements of past and present would have better served this extraordinary love story.
At Hampstead Theatre until March 4. https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/
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