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. Though such ideas which appear compelling to Mülhahn feel light and unexplored as an audience member, even with all its impressive motifs.

Owen Horsley directs at Hampstead for the first time; his credits for the RSC include the recent double bill of Rebellion and Wars of the Roses, as well as Maydays and Salomé. Ruby Thomas’ epic and playful modern love story takes eighteenth century court records as its starting point. But when he meets passionate young Catharina Mülhahn, so strong is the attraction that the match becomes inevitable. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions.The contemporary resonance is startling; by pointing this out in dogged, explicatory speeches, Thomas muffles the impact. 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. Instead, Horsley's production has a self-consciously ersatz feel, the stage dominated by an unlovely cheap-looking white panelled wall. The 21st century erupts into the 18th with clashing idioms and music in which harpsichord ripples are outnumbered by explosions of rock – as if the couple were living ahead of themselves.

All well and good, but I wish Thomas and her director Owen Horsley had dug more deeper and faithfully into the story's period setting, and allowed us to care about both characters as messy, complicated products of their specific moment rather than as emblematic figures co-opted by history, even if the words non binary and trans are conspicuously not used.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. He’s almost as bilious as some of the Hampstead’s patrons, who habitually barge past you en route to their seats.

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. 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. We’re passing through a phase where dramatists addressing the question of gender identity seem to place uplift above all else. For all the talk about respecting one’s “true essence”, it’s pretty noticeable that Thomas isn’t writing from her own experience here, and thus isn’t able to fully engage with the nuance involved.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. Fist-clenching activists may be happy enough; the rest of us are left starved of subtlety and insight.

They are joined by Daniel Abbott , David Carr, Marty Cruickshank, Kammy Darweish, Qasim Mahmood, Leigh Quinn and Timothy Speyer. It is as much a compliment (in terms of it being like Charlie Josephine’s phenomenal production) as it is a criticism (regarding its lacking uniqueness). Linck is all cocky confidence: poignantly, the moment he finally starts to show Mulhahn his vulnerability is the moment when men storm in with the inevitable arrest warrant. 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.When they were prosecuted for sodomy in 1721, Mülhahn claimed she’d been tricked by Linck and escaped with a three-year sentence. 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. Ruby Thomas's ambitious, drop-dead gorgeous piece roars onto Hampstead Theatre’s main stage with a rare swagger and brio, full of scintillating wit, swashbuckling action and ultimately a hugely satisfying emotional wallop. 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.