Hardy on Stage

Book Reviews Hardy on Stage Keith Wilson. Thomas Hardy on Stage. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. χ + 202 pp. $59.95 IN THOMAS HARDY on Stage Keith Wilson thoroughly examines Hardy's involvement with the theatre, his critical perspectives upon contemporary staging, and the adaptation of his works for the stage during Hardy's lifetime. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, this volume will likely become and remain the definitive study of the history of works Hardy adapted for the stage and of the Hardy Players who, in the main, performed them. Hardy the theatre-goer, to begin with the least vital of Wilson's topics, was quite at odds with Hardy the critic of the theatricality of Victorian and Edwardian stage conventions. The record of his attendance at a variety of plays in 1890s London, for example, shows him, as Wilson asserts, attending out of "obligation or accident rather than critical design," and very much a member of the "mainstream... influenced by the taste of the London social circle in which he enjoyed moving." Yet Hardy did follow the fortunes of Ibsen's plays produced in London, which put him far from the mainstream, and had an abiding interest in seeing Shakespeare's plays. The state of Shakespearean theatrical work in England frequently holds the mirror up to the state of England's theatre: in Hardy's time it clearly influenced his decision not to write for the theatre; and Hardy on staging Shakespeare is very different from Hardy appreciating or even mining Shakespeare for his own works. Declining an invitation (1908) to join a committee to support a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Hardy expressed his grave doubts that Shakespeare belonged in a contemporary theatrical milieu, guessing "he & all poets of high rank whose works have taken a stage direction, will cease altogether to be acted some day, & be simply studied." Hardy's early experience of Samuel Phelps's text-centered Drury Lane productions of Shakespeare set standards against which his experience of subsequent 221 ELT 39:2 1996 productions paled as visual effects dominated over the text and visual impact substituted for rhetorical impact. The more scenery, the less drama, and vice versa," he observed in an interview on Beerbohm Tree's 1911 production of Macbeth. Such a view is, of course, surprising from one of the foremost fictional realists of his era: yet Hardy remained convinced that the theatre was a realm in which the appeal must be to the imagination and not, through physical approximations of reality, to "bare eyesight." Hardy's experience as a theatregoer and as a practical critic of the theatre, then, convinced him that the contemporary theatre was inimical to the staging of serious drama, especially poetic drama. He objected to the practice of moulding parts to actors, not actors to parts, and, moreso, to the illusion of reality that increasingly replaced the theatre as a figurative arena in which "accessories are kept down to the plane of mere suggestions of place and time, so as not to interfere with the required high-relief of the action and emotions." In short, Hardy was temperamentally opposed to changes in his contemporary theatre, changes that were, eventually, to bring about the modern theatre. But neither Hardy's experience as a spectator nor his critical anti-realist stance were relevant to his work as a novelist and poet, artistic endeavors that did not prepare him for the work Wilson principally chronicles, adapting his works for the stage. The real problem with the adaptations Wilson discusses—including Far from the Madding Crowd, The Trumpet-Major, The Woodlanders, The Three Wayfarers, the four versions of Jude the Obscure, The Return of the Native, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles—lies in the essential intractability of the novel, especially episodic novels like Hardy's, for stage performance. The staccato effects Wilson notes throughout the volume as he appraises the playscripts wrung from novels suggest problems with transitions in the action, with characterization through what a character does and says and what is said about the character, and with the dialogue of country life put into a novel and then taken out of it and put upon the...