I have just heard Adam Thorpe's 2003 radio play Nought Happens Thus Twice, about Thomas Hardy's second marriage, to Florence Dugdale.
There is no more plot than Long Day's Journey Into Night, say, or Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom - in this case it's simply whether or not Florence will agree to accompany her husband on a jaunt - but it remains compelling throughout.
My friend late of North Berwick did not like this kind of play, an attitude I could never really understand. Okay, it's really no more than a camera slowly zooming in on its subjects, but what's wrong with that? It's certainly a difficult trick to pull off because as a writer you don't have the safety net of a plot for the audience to focus on to redeem the play if the dialogue happens to be less than stellar.
As is well known, Thomas Hardy's second marriage had its difficulties. In R.C. Sherriff's autobiography No Leading Lady the writer of Journey's End describes meetings with various literary lions after the success of his play, among them J.M. Barrie and Hardy. (The meeting with Barrie is at once hilarious and sad, but you will have to seek this highly entertaining memoir out for yourself.)
Florence was already Hardy's wife by the time Sherriff was being feted, and when she had a moment alone with the playwright she confided that she had been recently dragged along by Hardy to some muddy field in which he stood for an aeon in rapt contemplation because it evoked in him yet another memory of Wife Number One. Which is great for Hardy (and, indeed, for the world, because the best of his poems about Emma, written after her death, are very good indeed) but not so much so for the woman who is meant to have supplanted Emma in his affections.
Thorpe's play reminded me a little of the Maysles brothers' documentary Grey Gardens (which later became a musical) because we're likewise in the presence of two people who have been locked together for far too long, with no means of escape, and so there are cyclical recriminations, with nothing pushed to its resolution, because this is just one more day in purgatory and neither party is going to walk away. The outside world (the presence of the documentary makers in Grey Gardens, the invitation to see a film crew in Nought Happens Twice) maybe provides more of a focus than usual, but that's about it.
Still, you can't live at that kind of pitch 24 hours a day, and there are moments in the Hardy play when the couple seize on a distraction - the sighting of a grey squirrel as opposed to a red one - to provide respite, or maybe just to show that they do have things in common. There is even a kind of sitcom element - not that this is exactly a laff-o-rama - because it's the classic situation of two people being trapped together in a marriage or quasi-marriage, as with Steptoe and Son. And it may be remembered that Harold is capable of considerable verbal cruelty through the frustration of being trapped forever with his dad. His sarcastic or mocking words are a way of deluding himself that he has free will, but in that context they are no more powerful than that of a prisoner mocking his jailer - another sitcom premise. I am reminded, in fact, of a phrase used by Hardy in a poem about a prisoner and escort at a railway station: "grimful glee". So Florence talks of making a bonfire of Emma's things once Hardy is dead, but she, like Harold Steptoe, has a kind of special license. At the end of the play (spoiler alert) she does agree to visit the film crew - though the twist is that by that point, Hardy is reluctant, for fear that her obvious emotional state after all the conflicts they have been reheating will signal to onlookers that all is not well with the marriage.
It does help if you have some knowledge of Hardy, I suppose, to enjoy the play but it's not absolutely necessary. The piece's great strength is the teasing out of detail to provide an ever clearer impression of the enormous, unscaleable hole into which the two have toppled. It's just one more weary rehearsing of grievances (shades of yet another sitcom), upon which we happen to be eavesdropping.
Florence Dugdale had been a teacher in Enfield, and the poem from which the play's title is taken describes Hardy seeing her on a platform in Liverpool Street Station. Hardy watches her diminishing form as she goes down the platform towards the train - he's at the barrier - and, this presumably being the first youthful flush of their love, he laments that whatever future plans are made this moment, this feeling, will never return. Actually, why don't you read it for yourself here?
And while you're at it, why not read what Cecil Day-Lewis called "Hardy's great farewell to love", At Castel Boterel, here? The latter is a poem I love very much, along with After a Journey and I Found Her Out There - all of them about Emma, not Florence. And that grimfully gleeful sitcom pilot of a poem, more of a minor work, a snapshot, can be found here.
Update 16/8/21: Adam Thorpe's play, starring Patrick Malahide and Sylvestra Le Touzel and directed by Patrick Rayner, can be currently found on youtube here.
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