In an early scene of the exquisitely devastating miniseries Trespasses, two strangers in a pub ruminate on the relationship between art and pain. Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a schoolteacher taking a shift behind her family’s bar, admits she couldn’t finish reading A Clockwork Orange; the knowledge that the novel’s author, Anthony Burgess, was inspired by soldiers’ savage attack on his wife disturbed her too much. “He turned his suffering into art,” protests her customer, Michael (Tom Cullen). “I’d rather have the art without the suffering,” she retorts. “I’m sure his wife would, too.” Michael isn’t quite swayed. “Can you have one without the other?” he wonders.
Such beer-in-hand debates are as old as public drunkenness, but the conversation takes on new layers as the Troubles rage and Cushla and Michael’s romance blossoms in mid-1970s Belfast. She’s an empathetic Catholic, caring for a hypercritical mom (Gillian Anderson’s Gina) who has been lost in alcoholism since the death of her saintly husband and trying to help a young student who’s being bullied by the religious school’s leaders as well as his peers about his own parents’ “mixed” marriage. A Protestant barrister who speaks out against brutality by loyalist police, Michael has made fierce enemies on both sides of the conflict. All around the nascent couple is evidence that their love is doomed. Yet, like so many star-crossed lovers of fiction, they are drawn together by a force stronger than the ones pushing them apart. Whether you see their story, which debuted on Channel 4 in the UK and will premiere Sept. 20 on PBS, as a triumph or as a tragedy will depend on whose view of suffering you find most convincing.
Adapted by Ailbhe Keogan (Bad Sisters) from Louise Kennedy’s celebrated 2022 novel, Trespasses defies Romeo and Juliet cliché through specificity. It is a profound geopolitical injustice that the past few generations of Westerners mostly know war, even when it’s initiated by our own governments, as a misfortune that befalls people thousands of miles away, in dusty deserts and steaming jungles. Keogan subverts that notion, depicting Belfast as a war zone with violence at every doorstep and hatred festering on every corner. Everyone knows which side their neighbors are on—and surveils them, consciously or not, to make sure they stay on it.
The characters are no mere victims of circumstance. Petticrew, fresh off a thrillingly dark turn in Furious and returning to the place and era of her breakthrough role in the IRA drama Say Nothing, gives us a protagonist who is as bright and stubborn as she is compassionate. You can see why she’d fall for an older, more mature man over the boyish types who clumsily court her. Cullen makes his character irresistible—a crusader who voices unpopular truths, warning law enforcement that their cruelty only mints new IRA recruits. He’s not a pure hero, though. He faces his minefield of a life by compartmentalizing; Cushla knows he’s married, but his infidelity is not up for discussion. The slumped and slurring Gina seems, at first, to be the kind of messy grande dame Anderson has taken to playing in recent years, with mixed results. But even this broad matriarch deepens, and the performance hits subtler notes, in later episodes.
Just about every character surprises us, at least once, for good or ill. That complexity serves a thematic purpose as well as a narrative one. War flattens the enemy to slurs and stereotypes. Fighting for humanity means insisting upon individual identity; it means believing a Catholic and a Protestant in ’70s Belfast might belong together. “We must find the bravery to choose freedom over fear,” Michael proclaims in one of his righteous moments. “We cannot let the old bigots and the boys with guns tell us how to live.” For a couple on opposite sides of a war that allows for no gray area, this may be a suicidal ideology. But even if art is possible in the absence of suffering, love never comes without the risk of heartbreak. Whether it justifies that pain, Trespasses suggests, is a question too fraught and personal to be resolved by any glib barroom debate.
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