This week, Storytellers theatre company brings Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge to the stage, in a production adapted by Mary Elizabeth Burke Kennedy and directed by Alan Stanford. Hardy (1840-1928) - although a far greater poet than novelist - has a major claim on the 19th-century novel. His central characters are invariably caught at the mercy of circumstances as well as complex plots which frequently rely heavily on a veritable logjam of coincidences. Characters such as Tess and Jude Fawley are victims, but with Michael Henchard, the most Shakespearean of his creations, Hardy presents a brooding, physical man whose tragedy is entirely of his own making.
Published in 1886, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which predates Tess of the d'Ubervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), is a powerful study of guilt, retribution, delusions and ill-fated good intentions. As ever, Hardy places his main protagonists centre-stage, while a vividly drawn cast of locals act as both chorus and judge. Casterbridge - based on Hardy's Dorchester - evokes an England hovering between the old and the new, and emerging into the modern world while remaining conscious of its ancient past.
In a moment of drunken bravado, the frustrated Henchard sells his wife and child to a sailor at a fair. Hardy, however, has already ensured that his reader knows the marriage has proved less than happy. Years pass and the bartered wife, newly bereaved, returns with her grown daughter in search of Henchard. The angry young man has now become a respected local personage. He has never forgotten his behaviour at the fair, nor has he forgiven himself. Determined to atone, he has remained sober and, on being given the chance to make amends, remarries the ailing Susan and claims his daughter.
Human nature always intrigued Hardy, who understood the perverse power of the weak as well as the more obvious abuses of the strong. Susan's lie about their daughter acts in tandem with Henchard's.
In his portrayal of Henchard, Hardy stresses his overwhelming loneliness as evident from his desperate, engagingly clumsy attempt to win Farfrae, later his rival, as a friend - and, perhaps subconsciously, as a replacement for his dead brother. Having become successful, the mature Henchard has left his younger, unemployed self behind but has kept his guilt alive. Henchard's self-hatred has become a necessity. It is interesting that for all his flaws he is not a liar, and most of the deceptions are perpetrated by other characters. Events do take their cue from his volatile mixture of pride, vulnerability and aggression.
Later Lucetta returns to marry Henchard, driven not by passion but by a bizarre sense of justice. Henchard's ruin and eventual lonely death secure him an heroic stature by virtue of Hardy having imbued him with a convincing humanity, however faulty.
