Harry Crawford or Eugenia Falleni? Man or woman? Father or mother? These are the extreme polarities of identity which at one time or another sit on the shoulders of the central character in Australian writer Lachlan Philpott’s new play The Trouble with Harry, presented by TheatreofplucK in the MAC, Belfast. 

 

Eugenia-Harry was an actual historical figure, born in Italy in 1875, and raised in New Zealand. As a teenager Eugenia began dressing as a man to do manual labour, then left her uncomprehending family to become a cabin-boy, eventually fetching up in Australia. While at sea she was raped repeatedly by a sea captain who by chance discovered that the self-styled ‘Eugene’ was in fact a woman. A daughter, Josephine, was born, and was farmed out to an Italian ‘Granny’ for upbringing. 

 

Eugenia, now definitively (for social purposes at least) Harry Crawford, married a widow, Annie Birkett, who brought a teenage son into the marriage with her. That is the situation we first encounter in Philpott’s play, which scrutinises the crucial period of Harry’s life leading to his conviction for murdering Annie, and being sent to prison.

 

The catalyst for the implosion of Harry’s world is the return of his daughter Josephine, two decades after she was first given to Granny. As played by Roisin Gallagher, Josephine is a haunted figure, whose snatches of recovered memory about her ‘father’ impel her to challenge the deception he is currently peddling, and fuel her impulse to destroy it. Josephine could be simply a wild, vindictive character in the drama, but Philpott and Gallagher frame her otherwise, producing a nuanced, sympathetic portrait of a troubled individual, destabilised by her uncertain provenance, and desperate to find the relative stability she thinks the truth will provide for her.

 

What that truth actually is, however, is another question, and another theme preoccupying Philpott in The Trouble with Harry. Why has Harry done what he has done with his identity? Is “he” lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or just serially opportunistic? How has Annie been fooled by “the snake, the thing” (a dildo) he keeps hidden in the marital chamber? The play’s answers are non-committal: we do not know for sure, it says, and we should not guess without making it absolutely clear that we are guessing.

 

The perils of speculatively projecting shafts of light into the murky recesses of personal histories are neatly semaphored by Philpott in his use of two commentators, Man and Woman, who MC the action wryly, occasionally cueing alternative versions of key dialogues from the characters involved in them. It sounds an archly contrived device, but Philpott reserves for his Greek chorus some of the most potently poetic writing in a script which is scrupulously honed and sharply resonant. Both Gordon Mahn and Stephanie Weyman pitch their interventions perfectly, astutely fatalistic but never cynical, ironically detached yet strangely empathetic.

 

Niall Rea’s set designs cleverly underline the extent to which Philpott’s protagonists are forever trying to stabilise and firmly focus their sense of personal identity, to establish who they actually are in relation to those around them, and what role they need to play in different social situations. Rea’s main device is a set of steel frames on rollers, which cast members place strategically for use as doorways and windows, emphasising the subtle shifts in personality which occur when people either walk or look through them.

 

And that is in many ways the heart of The Trouble with Harry: it probes fascinatingly the extent to which character itself is of necessity malleable, mutable according to circumstance, and disconcertingly chameleon-like where we like to assume some irreducible core of unchanging inner reality.

 

It’s obvious that Philpott views these themes as being of sharp contemporary relevance. Why can we not be our ‘real’ selves in public? Why do we constantly dissimulate in both our social and personal relationships? What is ‘authentic’ and unalterable in human nature, and what is up for negotiation? The Trouble with Harry doesn’t answer these questions definitively, but poses them with particular intelligence and acuity.

 

Oddly, Harry himself seems the least conflicted character on stage in TheatreofplucK’s world premiere production, at least in Michelle Wiggins’ studiously impassive performance. The impassivity may be deliberate – in the world which he inhabits, Harry literally can’t afford to flutter an eyelid in the wrong direction for fear of being outed. There is, however, scope for more explicit examination of what is going on in Harry’s mind, as the world he has so carefully constructed for himself begins to fracture. 

 

It’s the only area in which director Alyson Campbell appears to have been less than effective – her staging is otherwise fluid and ungimmicky, her illumination of character clear and vividly projected. The play’s conclusion is especially affecting, Philpott refusing to put a creator’s gloss upon the limited circumstantial evidence on which Harry was convicted of murdering Annie (played with convincing vulnerability by Louise Mathews), and leaving open the question of whether or not he was actually guilty.

 

TheatreofplucK’s production of The Trouble with Harry was mounted as part of the Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast, and is an eloquent example of what grown-up, gender-conscious theatre is capable of achieving. Its relevance is, though, emphatically not confined to members of the LGBT community; it is a play which all those interested in our ongoing evolution as sentient social beings would benefit from seeing.