In PBS's Heartrending Trespasses, Love Defies War in '70s Belfast

Tom Cullen and Lola Petticrew in Trespasses —Wildgaze Films and All3Media International 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.

Lola Petticrew, left, and Gillian Anderson in Trespasses —Wildgaze Films and All3Media International Adapted by Ailbhe Keogan ( Bad Sisters ) from Louise Kennedy’s celebrated 2022 novel, Trespasses defies Romeo and Juliet cliché through specificity.