Getting to Chipping Norton for this Oxford reviewer was a bit of a headache on a Thursday evening, but there can’t be a theatre - outside of Dorset - better placed for a play about the novelist Thomas Hardy towards the closing stages of his life. For the décor and furnishings are straight out of the late 19^th Century (although somewhat less smelly and flea ridden than I imagine of provincial theatres at that time).

Based on a book by Christopher Nicholson and adapted by Simon Reade, I had been looking forward to this adaptation originated at the Dorchester theatre and arts venue where Thomas Hardy presumably worked with the Thomas Hardy Players to perform ‘Tess’ in 1924. So the story goes, Hardy, ever the shy romantic with an eye for a young milkmaid, had become infatuated with Augusta, and based the character of Tess on her. Years later, as an old man, married to his second wife, he became infatuated with Augusta’s daughter Gertrude Bugler, casting her in the leading role as Tess, and nurturing her theatrical career with the Hardy Players.

Hardy’s relationship with ‘Gertie’ and his troubled second marriage with Florence (his former secretary) are contextualised with his work - as a leading poet and writer - and his domestic situation. He writes with the shawl of his first wife, Emma, wrapped round him and keeps the Austrian pine trees which they planted together to the consternation of Florence who finds them gloomy in the hard long winter, and presumably wants to remove the reminders of Emma present in their lives. Their whole marital rift is hung upon this dispute as we see Hardy; the romantic and preserver of nature, desperately trying to placate the second Mrs Hardy who needs to modify their situation - both mental and physical.

Tim Hardy gives a good representation of Thomas and Alison Reid does well as the increasingly sour and embittered Florence. There is nothing particular to criticise in Katy Sobey’s Gertrude either. But somehow, she is absolutely not Tess; and therefore not Gertrude Bugler either. Hardy would not have become infatuated with Sobey because she doesn’t emanate rural simpering humility. Her looks, demeanour and delivery are totally noughties, and I don’t mean from the 1900’s.

Hardy, famously pessimistic in outlook, viewed human nature as flawed. All fate begot was disappointment for most of his characters; ‘to be born at all is the primal misfortune’, as he says in the play. While I can’t discuss the intricacies of Hardy’s redemptive qualities and characterisation here; there were pitifully few signs of any happy endings or resolutions here. And we didn’t have the time and space to empathise much with the protagonists.

At times, I felt, as a member of the audience, that I had mistakenly spent an evening with a warring couple. Maybe the Hardys should have gone out alone