Glorious journey back to Hardy’s Wessex

REVIEW: A Beautiful Thread: Thomas Hardy in Words and Music – Forum Theatre, Malvern (Friday, June 20 for one night only).

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BY the time that Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, the rural life that would become the eternal theme of his books and poems was already a lost age.

As a young man, he would have undoubtedly heard the older people in his village speak of the turmoil that had existed in an economically depressed countryside following the end of the Napoleonic wars.

The loss of jobs brought about by mechanisation, and the general plight of the landless agricultural labourers, had all conspired to start the drift from the land to England’s cities that would continue apace as the 19th century wore on.

No wonder then that Hardy’s tales of his beloved Wessex were invariably laced with a sense of impending misfortune and darkness, conditions not all that far removed from the soul of the writer himself.

Hardy the man, his works, life and times were vividly portrayed on this hot, mowing meadow of a night by celebrated actor Anton Lesser and Lucia Bonbright, as they gloriously brought to life writer Deirdre Shields’ fabulous narrative.

Love, loss and redemption were familiar themes for the Victorian writer, and Hardy’s life story most certainly mirrored the characters in his works.

For example, we learn that this incurable romantic also invariably fell in love with his female creations, Bathsheba in Far from The Madding Crowd and Tess, she of d’Urbervilles fame.

Ms Shields’ cradle-to-the-grave account never once faltered, secure in the hands of our guides, in particular the rise and fall of Anton Lesser’s voice complementing the achingly beautiful cadences of the accompaniment performed by the Orchestra of the Swan.

Under the steady hand of director David Le Page, the music was agonisingly beautiful, every passage a hymn to a bucolic paradise lost that now tragically exists solely in our imaginations.

Like a midsummer dawn chorus, the works of Holst and Warlock combined with folk styles, the roots of which seemed to go even deeper than those of the greatest Dorset oak, all of which evoked images of field and barn that were once the labourer’s place of endless toil.

Fiddle, flute and trumpet swapped notes as if flowing from the throats of springtime birds, a glorious symphony anchored with the more ominous-sounding bass notes, these perhaps being harbingers of the darkening storm clouds on the agricultural horizon.

This odyssey through the life of one of England’s greatest writers was a sheer pleasure from beginning to end, beautifully crafted by actors and musicians whose respect and feeling for the subject was never ever in any doubt.