Linck & Mülhahn

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Ruby Thomas’ epic and playful modern love story takes eighteenth century court records as its starting point. Anastasius Linck, an orphaned army deserter, was sentenced to death; their wife got off with a three-year jail term, after pleading ignorance of her husband’s sex at the time of their marriage.

Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Linck was executed by sword, as befitted a male soldier, rather than by burning, the punishment for a woman: proof that the authorities couldn’t pin down what, precisely, offended them about the couple, at a time when religious certainties were also shifting. There are certain language choices – for example, a 22-year-old saying ‘fart’ – designed to bring a more modern slant to the 18th century story, but unlike flatulence, it feels forced. An audio described performance will take place on 25 February, with a captioned showing on 28 February. The most frustrating example of this is in its conclusion, where an intriguing commentary on truth is presented by the older Mülhahn, about something being made being “un-made”, and how the concept of truth has become subjective, ready to be reinterpreted by individuals as they see fit.For all its spirit, there's something old school embedded into the structure of Thomas's play that director Owen Horsley's furious blasts of the Sex Pistols between scenes can’t shake off. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Though the story and ideas should be compelling, the arch tone of Owen Horsley’s production, and some panto-style acting in the supporting cast, keep us at arm’s length. From Gentleman Jack to Orlando, the queer costume drama has been pushing debates around gender and sexuality into the mainstream in the disguise of rollicking good fun.

Touch is often mentioned, from the touché of swordsmanship to the idea of touch going beyond what the eyes can see, to get closer to the “true essence” of an individual. Written by Ruby Thomas, this epic love story centres on the true lives of a gender-pioneering couple – dashing soldier Anastasius Linck and the rebellious Catharina Mülhahn. Please note that our content warnings evolve as the production does throughout rehearsal and previews, so there may be changes made between booking and attending the theatre. The contemporary resonance is startling; by pointing this out in dogged, explicatory speeches, Thomas muffles the impact.Maggie Bain ( Man to Man, Wales Millennium Centre; Henry V, Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre) plays the role of Anastasius Linck with Helena Wilson ( Jack Absolute Flies Again, National Theatre; The Lady from the Sea, Donmar) playing the role of Catharina Mülhahn and Lucy Black ( The Durrells, ITV; The Haystack, Hampstead Theatre) playing Mother. Ruby Thomas' epic and playful love story, inspired by eighteenth-century court records and the extraordinary lives of a gender-pioneering couple, opened at Hampstead Theatre, London, in January 2023. It’s appropriate for our current post-truth era, and the idea of retrospectively applying a new truth or interpretation to stories of gender from history is incredibly timely and novel, but to leave it as a footnote rather than an idea explored from the start – especially when the play opens and closes with an older Mülhahn as our narrator – is underwhelming and disappointing. The basic facts of their story remain intact, but the lens is very much a 21st century one, which stretches to the ahistorical way they think and talk about themselves.

These meagre but glinting spokes form the basis of Ruby Thomas's freewheeling reconstruction, which casts Anastasius not as a lesbian but as neither woman nor man. A handful of similes – such as one comparison to bubbles, of all things – don’t come across as lyrical as Thomas might have intended, but more awkward and incongruous. And the closing attempt to imagine a different future feels unearned, and tonally disjointed from what's gone before.There’s enough zesty life in Wilson’s Mülhahn, and enough beady steel in Bain’s Linck to keep you watching. Our autumn/winter season celebrates Hampstead’s cosmopolitan roots with a range of international playwrights from Scotland to the USA, Northern Ireland to France and some great homegrown talent in between. The polite harpsichord music of balls and boudoirs is fractured by ecstatic blasts of music from the 20th-century counterculture, as the can of worms is cracked open by a versatile 10-strong cast. Directed by Owen Horsley, the play’s creative team also includes Simon Wells (design), Matt Daw (lighting), Max Pappenheim (sound), Dewi Johnson (assistant direction), Rachel Bown-Williams (fight and intimacy direction) and Ruth Cooper Brown (fight and intimacy direction). Many of us, one would like to think, should be familiar with the concept of gender presentation, but there is little offered here beyond reinforcing the idea of being true to oneself – though perhaps that bears repeating in this day and age.

Whether that's putting new work on stages across the world or supporting our outreach and learning programmes, every purchase you make really does make a difference. Like the principal characters, Thomas’s script eludes categorisation, weaving in Restoration comedy, Jane Austen and courtroom drama, as it depicts the unseemly scrabbles of the marriage market. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Irrelevant asides and some truly dreadful acting derail the Courtroom scene that takes up much of the second half.One moment we have a tender domestic scene, the next we are in comic absurdist territory with a courtroom whose judge could have been written by Peter Cook.