Thomas Hardy and the Hardy Players: The Evans and Tilley Adaptations

Thomas Hardy and the Hardy Players: The Evans and Tilley Adaptations By Keith Wilson University of Ottawa There is in the Dorset County Record Office in Dorchester a manuscript minute book that covers the committee and annual general meetings of the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society in its later years.1 Couched in the spare but self-conscious officialese of its kind, the book offers in its final pages touching testimony to the passing of an organisation with which time had at last caught up. Present at the meeting on Wednesday 31 May 1939, at Mrs. Major's Restaurant in Cornhill, during which the affairs of the Society were settled, were Mr. H. A. Martin (President), Mr. T. H. Tilley, Major H. O. Lock, Mr. A. J. Gillam, Mr. E. J. Stevens, Mr. W. J. Fare, Mr. W. R. Bawler, Mr. J. H. Moore, Mrs. Major, Miss M. M. Dawes, and Mrs. E. Lloyd (Secretary). It seems fitting that the names, courtesy titles attached and with ladies bringing up the rear, should read like a cast-list in an old theatre programme because, of the eleven, nine had appeared in productions by the Hardy Players and indeed six—Martin, Tilley, Lock, Stevens, Fare, and Bawler—had appeared in the very first full-length production of a play based on a Hardy novel, The TrumpetMajor , far back in 1908. Theatrical justice alone would sanction their appearance on-stage for the Society's last bow. The final act had been a protracted one. The last production by the Hardy Players, and also their most famous, had been 1924's Tess. At the Society's annual general meeting on 22 September 1925, T. H. Tilley was duly re-elected Honorary Stage Manager, a position he had occupied from the beginning of the Hardy plays. But at a meeting of the dramatic sub-committee held on 8 January 1926 it was decided, after long discussion, not to perform a play but to arrange a dramatic reading for March instead. Tilley was again elected Honorary Stage Manager at the annual general meeting held on 29 September 1926, but again there was no play during the subsequent season, although on 30 December 1926 the BBC broadcast from its Bournemouth Studios a " Wessex Programme" which included, with substantially the same cast as the 1911 production, a performance of The Three Wayfarers.2 At the 1927 annual general meeting, and again in 1928, Tilley declined to serve as stage manager, but by then the Society had more than the question of whether to stage plays to ponder. The 1927 meeting had produced impassioned discussion about whether the Society itself should continue, given the poor attendance at meetings during the previous year, and the eventual decision was to move to fortnightly from weekly gatherings. At the AGM held on 2 October 1928, the problem of poor attendance was again addressed, but a proposal that the Society's activities be suspended for a year Wilson: Thomas Hardy and the Hardy Players was defeated. At the same meeting, Dr. E. W. Smerdon was elected president, apparently in his absence, which necessitated a special general meeting when he declined to serve. He was replaced by H. A. Martin who presided over the AGM on 15 October 1929 and a subsequent meeting on 10 December, at which it was decided that the Society should be suspended until March 1931. In the event, nothing happened until 27 November 1936, when a meeting was held of the committee , which decided to call a general meeting for January 1937. Again nothing happened until the inevitable was confronted in 1939. Thus fifteen years after the final Hardy play and ten years after the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society had had its last genuine season of meetings, its skeleton was laid to rest by some of those who had once been most responsible for its vitality. It is the most public and, for critics of Hardy, most interesting manifestation of that vitality—the preparation and performance of the Hardy plays—with which I am primarily concerned here, although it is important not to lose sight of the parent organisation that fostered and outlived the Hardy Players. The emergence...