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. Ruby Thomas has unearthed an altogether sadder story from early 18th-century Prussia, of a married couple who were tried for sodomy after it was discovered that the husband had been born female.
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. What the truth of their union might have been is the subject of a giddily anachronistic five-act play from Ruby Thomas, which explores the headiness of personal freedom, and the price that is still being paid for it by those who don’t conform to societal norms.
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. 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.
There are echoes of the marriage comedies of Jane Austen and Shakespeare, as Catharina’s widowed mother tries in vain to pair her off with a dunderhead with 15 acres, while her only daughter secretly explores the erotics of verbal sparring over bails of linen with the handsome young shopkeeper she once spied through a window, before he was forced to desert the army to escape physical examination.
What do truth and intimacy mean under such extreme pressures? Owen Horsley’s production locates it in a tender bath scene – perversely stuffed into an overhung corner of the set – where Maggie Bain’s charismatic Anastasius strips off for the first time, in the garret that has become the couple’s marital home, moments before the law comes banging at the door, bringing an abrupt swerve into courtroom drama.
There is a neat theatrical economy as a brutally diminished Anastasius is defended from the witness box by the comrades and conquests they deceived in their former life, who suddenly understand why they were a more considerate lover and a kinder friend, and Catharina’s flustered mother (a splendid Lucy Black) discovers she has condemned the daughter she wished to save.
The gear changes from broad comedy to debate and finally polemic might be a bit clunky, and the references to Descartes and Locke rather peremptory, but Thomas is a talented writer, who boldly fills the main stage with a question as pressing today as it ever was: “Tell a person they do not exist … how do you fight that?”
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 4 March
