Linck & Mülhahn

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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.

Ruby Thomas’ epic and playful modern love story is inspired by eighteenth century court records and the extraordinary true lives of this gender pioneering couple. If you missed I, Joan at the Globe last year, then Hampstead Theatre’s Linck and Mülhahn tries to emulate its daring and ambitious nature, but only somewhat successfully.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. 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. 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.

They are joined by Daniel Abbott , David Carr, Marty Cruickshank, Kammy Darweish, Qasim Mahmood, Leigh Quinn and Timothy Speyer. 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. Dashing soldier Anastasius Linck has no intention of falling in love, but a chance encounter with the rebellious Catharina Mülhahn changes everything.Based on real events and characters, Ruby Thomas’s play is a rapier-sharp historical romp, festooned with sparkling dialogue, that ultimately draws blood and tears. 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. 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. They were ultimately tried for sodomy, and this could easily be one of those depressing stories that queer history books are littered with, the ones where people dare to be different and then get crushed by conventional society’s peppermill. There’s only so much one can speak to this issue as a cisgender critic, but there’s certainly some elements to the writing which don’t quite land as comfortably as they should, feeling clunky or otherwise out-of-place.

This play's relentless enthusiasm for turning tragedy into comedy founders in the second half, when Linck’s fight for his life turns into a grating courtroom farce packed with the buffoonish antics of various bewigged gentlemen. It’s a metaphor for religion, gender and conventional morality, but an unfortunate one in a play full of stray threads. The play is over-packed as a narrative, however, with several underwritten characters, such as the foppish suitor for Mülhahn, and the contemporary resonances sometimes feel heavily underscored or didactic. Fist-clenching activists may be happy enough; the rest of us are left starved of subtlety and insight. Officers whore in the back streets, while the wilful Catharina (Helena Wilson) sits crossly against a wall of Simon Wells’s revolving acrylic set, listening to her life ticking loudly away.Even in moments of silence in the courtroom scenes, a single stare from them at whoever is in the dock conveys so much, and it’s absolutely fascinating to witness. 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.