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

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 a...