THE New Hardy Players, who were founded to mark the 100th birthday of Norrie Woodall*, the last surviving member of the original Hardy Players, this year celebrate their own big birthday – their 20th anniversary. They marked it with a return to touring their summer production for the first time since the pandemic, with a wonderful new play with music, created by writer Victoria Bowles from Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Folk short stories, which were later renamed A Few Crusted Characters.

The stories were written in 1890 and 1891, featuring a colourful cast of characters – farmers, lusty young men, feisty young women, West Gallery musicians, parsons, curates, soldiers, pub landlords and ladies, fox-hunting squires, school teachers, thatchers, constables and shop-keepers. They have been compared to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it’s easy to see why. All human life is here – love, death, greed, kindness, drunkenness, poverty, wealth, lies, philandering, mishaps, mistakes and mistaken identities.

Directed by Alistair Braidwood and Penny Levick, with a cast of 36 actors and musicians, the action takes place around a wagon, driven by carrier Burthen (Oliver Hickey), carrying villagers from Longpuddle, meeting and dropping people along the way. The stories roll seamlessly into each other and the play is performed without an interval to maintain the momentum.

Some are funny – the musicians of the Longpuddle Quire drinking too much warm ale and brandy until they fall asleep during the sermon, and lascivious Tony Kytes (Harry Cockerill), whose eye for a pretty girl gets him into all manner of trouble. Others are sad – the two couples who marry the wrong person, but when they realise their error, one happily reunited pair are later found drowned. And most reflect Hardy’s knowledge and understanding of the villagers and farmworkers he grew up with – quick-witted Netty Sargent (Gemma Higgins) managing to keep the copyhold of her uncle’s pub, although he is actually newly dead; a “farmer” who is a runaway soldier (Penny Cake) and gets away with it; and feckless Andrey Satchel (Harry Cockrel) unwilling to marry his pregnant fiancee (Hanna Trevorrow), locked up in the church tower and forgotten over-night by fox-hunting Parson Billy Toogood (Tom Archer).

There are many people who think Thomas Hardy’s books are gloomy, miserable and hard to read. Hardy was a great observer of the people around him and their lives. He created some of the most memorable characters in literature, many of them women, whose hard lives he depicts unflinchingly but with compassion. But his stories are not unremittingly bleak – there are happy endings for some couples, lots of music, seasonal festivals and great kindness alongside early death, betrayal, extreme poverty, natural disasters and a cruel and often unfair class structure.

A Few Crusted Characters is a delightful antidote to the preconceptions of the Hardy detractors. The stories are light and bright, true to life as Hardy saw it, but kindly and forgiving. I hope it sends a few audience members back to the novels, to the joys of Far From The Madding Crowd and Under The Greenwood Tree, as well as the darkness of Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure.

The 2025 anniversary tour took the New Hardy Players to Abbotsbury Swannery, Maumbury Rings at Dorchester, Holme for Gardens at Wareham and the grounds of Minterne House. The New Hardy Players will be reviving the spirit of the old West Gallery musicians and singers in their Christmas show, Going The Rounds, on 11th and 12th December.

* Norrie Woodall was the younger sister of Gertrude Bugler, who played Tess in the original stage version of Hardy’s best-known novel. Norrie also performed with the Players. She died in 2011, aged 105.

FC

Pictured are scenes from the play – Burthen, the carrier (Oliver Hickey), with some of the characters, the audience gathering on the lawns of Minterne House, some of the musicians, and the Longpuddle Quire, drunk in the West Gallery.