While there is a sense of touchstones being arranged, Tony Marchant’s drama is delicate, compassionate and moving
Believable and loving ... Max (Callum Booth-Ford), Vicky (Anna Friel) and Stephen (Emmett J Scanlan) in Butterfly. Photograph: ITV
Go upstairs and get changed,” has a special meaning in the Duffy household. Rather than a harried instruction, it is a moment of profound liberation for 11-year-old Max, the central figure in Butterfly (ITV), the new three-part drama from Tony Marchant. He is able to take off his hated school uniform and, in the privacy of his own home, dress as he wishes – like the girl he feels himself to be. But his mother, Vicky (Anna Friel) – torn between the desire to let her son be happy and to protect him – reminds Max: “You’re a boy on the outside. In public, you do what boys do.”
As you might expect from the first mainstream drama about a transgender child who wants to transition, there is a sense of touchstones being arranged. There is grandma Barbara, embodying the older generation’s eye-rolling bafflement and insistence that everything is modern nonsense (“Everyone wants to be different, don’t they?”); there are the bullies, who emerge for quick scenes that don’t conjure the oppressive sense of menace that epitomises schoolyard aggression; and there is the family member (Max’s sister, Lily) who is his shield and sword as he fights his way to gender freedom and represents the power and glory of acceptance.
Beyond these few odd clunks, it is a wonderfully delicate drama that covers new ground carefully and features fully realised characters at war with their instincts, intellects and worse or better natures. It emerges that Max’s dad, Stephen, moved out not because he and Vicky were having problems, as Max initially assumes, but because he could not cope with Max’s increasingly “strange little ways” (to quote Barbara). He is – crucially – not painted as a villain for this. There is a moving scene when Max, in the bath, tells Stephen that he hates his willy. Stephen tries gently to reason him out of it: there is nothing to be done, it will just get bigger and be like Daddy’s and it will be fine. “It gets in the way. I wish it would fall off.” Stephen’s fear and anxiety build through several more exchanges and, in another flashback, we see him driven to knock back Max – dancing in a skirt and a pink jumper – with a slap. It is an awful, sad, authentic and compassionate scene.
The pivotal moment, when the family is pushed out of the fragile compromise they have reached, is when Max – who has wet himself after being unable to bring himself to use the boys’ toilets at school and who sees his mother getting ready to go out on a date – makes a suicide attempt. Stephen moves back to try to make everything – everyone – “normal”. The family is put in touch with a gender counsellor and, in the final scenes, Max comes downstairs in a girls’ school uniform and has his sister announce that he wants to go to school like this from now on and to be known as Maxine. “I feel like I have to,” she says softly. “I feel like I must.” She asks her mother how she looks. “You look lovely,” she says tearfully. “Do you think I’m ready?” Maxine asks. “I don’t know, I’m sorry. I don’t know.” Stephen is beside himself with anger, grief and fear. And so they must find a way to go on.
It will be interesting to discover how many of the issues and controversies surrounding trans identity, activism and the politics of transitioning – especially in the case of children – Marchant will cover. Unpicking such a complex web of feelings, facts and ideologies would be daunting for any dramatist. But Marchant’s record of successfully delving into knotty social and family problems (take Goodbye Cruel World, about degenerative illness) and examinations of modern masculinity (Take Me Home, The Mark of Cain, Different for Girls) is unmatched.
The most striking and important thing about the first episode was how much care was taken to create a believable, loving family. The relationship between modern parents and their knowing but vulnerable children has rarely been better captured than in the exchange between Vicky and Lily as Stephen returns, with his suitcase, to the marital home. “Taking in lodgers?” says Lily. “Times must be hard.” They grin at each other and go in.
We know them, so we know Max – and so we must come to know Maxine. We must also ask ourselves what we would do in any of these characters’ places. Allied to uniformly brilliant performances, this is truthful, beautiful and powerful stuff.