Word: henchard
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...like the shadows," says Michael Henchard, the hero of this drama, and the viewer immediately knows where he is: in Thomas Hardy country, dark, gloomy and unrelievedly tragic. Haunted by one terrible incident in his past, Henchard proceeds to ruin his own life and the lives of nearly everyone he touches, until, like Shakespeare's Lear, the character he most resembles, he is left with nothing but his own relentless memories...
...Hardy, the plot takes a dozen improbable turns. When he was a poor young man, Henchard got drunk at a country fair and sold his wife and daughter to a sailor for five guineas. Eighteen years later he is a rich hay and wheat merchant, as well as the mayor of Casterbridge. He is remorseful for his sin, however, and when his wife turns up, the sailor having been lost at sea, he tries to right the old wrong by marrying her again and adopting his own daughter...
...escape his past, so far as Hardy is concerned, and Henchard's obsessive fear that his secret may be found out causes him not only to remember the past, but in a sense to repeat it, and the drama unfolds from there. When criticized for his unlikely scenarios, Hardy said that he was interested not in plot but in character. Playing Henchard, Alan Bates adds another finely molded performance to his credits. Strong and weak at the same time, his Henchard has the un stoppable vitality of the attacking bull he wrestles to a standstill...
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