There’s nothing obscure about my new Jude
The meaning of Thomas Hardy’s tragic, ‘obscene’ final novel has never been more clear, writes Howard Brenton
Ten years ago, when working with the theatre director Howard Davies, we discovered a shared passion for Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. This 1895 work is tough to read but overwhelmingly human. It’s the great outsider novel.
Jude Fawley is not as loved a character as, say, Hardy’s innocent Tess of the D’urbervilles, but he should be. His thwarted drive to learn, to change himself, is inspirational even though he is defeated. He is a self-taught working-class man, a stone mason, who is denied his heart’s desire
– to study classics at Oxford University. He has an inner life beyond the comprehension of the people around him. If he’d been a good, sober churchgoer, dutiful to the sour aunt who took him in as an orphan, perhaps he’d have found a patron and got somewhere.
But he’s a rebel and will not behave properly. He drinks too much, he loves sex. His two great love affairs are disasters.
The first is with the uninhibited Arabella Donn. She comes across Jude reading in the fields and throws a pig’s penis at his head and he is lost! Later, she lies about being pregnant and entraps him into marriage. The second affair is with Sue Bridehead, his cousin. They live together openly and have three children out of wedlock (this was probably the last straw for the Bishop of Wakefield, who threw his copy of the book into the fire). Sue is a wonderfully complex character and the opposite of Arabella. She is psychologically fragile but with a strange energy.
Sue is also in torment about living with Jude. Near the end of the book, as the family sink into dire poverty, the eldest child – the eerily intelligent 10-year-old they’ve nicknamed “Old Father Time” – kills himself and the other children. He leaves a note which reads “because we are too meny”.
Jude the Obscure’s attack on the hypocrisy of late-victorian attitudes towards class, education, the role of women and marriage caused outrage when it was published. “Jude the Obscene!” thundered the reviewer in the Morning Post.
Hardy never wrote another novel, but whether that was because of the reception is disputed. Perhaps in revenge against the literary establishment, he went on to reinvent himself as a great lyric poet. So why does Jude the Obscure appeal to us so much? I think it’s because truly tragic stories don’t in the end depress. They are bracing, you imagine their reverse – the outsider, Jude, triumphing.
Six years ago, Howard and I approached Sky TV about adapting the novel. It seemed to be on, then Sky became stingy about budgets and scratchy about our artistic approach, so we withdrew and the idea died.
But in the arts nothing is lost and Howard advised me to write it as a play. Our Jude, our Judith, would be a refugee, also with a burning desire to go to Oxford. Gradually, I began to research it, but just when we were getting around to arranging a brainstorming week, Howard fell seriously ill and – despite tremendous courage – he left us. I missed him terribly and for some time I found it impossible to do any more work on the play. But last summer, thanks to the encouragement of Edward Hall (Hampstead’s artistic director), it began to come alive again.
My Jude is in no way an updated version. It’s not an academic exercise and audiences don’t need to know the novel. Playwrights are jazz-playing jackdaws when it comes to sources, shamelessly looting and improvising. New stories grow out of the old. Now, I’m not sure what is still recognisable from the book and what is not. I’ve junked a lot – even the famous “Old Father Time” scene.
But I have tried to learn an important lesson from Hardy’s very angry work – tell a simple story as truthfully as you can and the complexity of the world’s injustice will force its way up from below, bending the narrative as you go along. Hardy’s great original theme of talent cruelly denied, a beautiful soul betrayed and destroyed by an indifferent society, is still there but changed into a new tune.
And, while I was writing, someone else’s work hit the play. Jude Fawley is a classical scholar and so is my Judith Nasrani, both miraculously selftaught. It seemed natural that Euripides would be Judith’s favourite author. She is a refugee and he wrote about refugees, particularly women in many of his plays, who are exiled. As Medea says: “I am a refugee, despised, thought nothing of.”
Judith’s iconoclasm and drive, her refusal to be what people expect her to be, is Euripidean. I read him a lot while devising the play. He was one of those very rare writers who was aware that his world was falling apart and a new one was trying to be born (Chekhov was another). He had no easy political answers except for a conviction that democracy must not be lost – the ultimate message of his greatest play, The Bacchae.
One of the wonderful things about being a playwright is that you can try to invoke people who are far, far brighter, wiser and braver than you are. Like Jude, Judith is touched with genius. I don’t begin to understand Euripides’ view of the world, but she does and I couldn’t resist an encounter between the two.
She actually sees him and talks to him, as Homer’s heroes saw and talked to the gods. And in her obsessive drive to get to Oxford she is one of a number of characters I’ve written who drive a straight line through a very bent world often, though not always, with tragic consequences. I’ve come to want to write a theatre of heroes: not antiheroes – though they may have flaws – but true heroes, exemplars.
I don’t want to give away the play’s plot but Judith is traduced. That is a horrible, old-fashioned word: to sully, impugn, besmirch. And I’m ashamed to have heard so many stories of it happening to refugees and immigrants in my country.
What happens to her reflects my fear that our prejudices against the foreigner are destroying us spiritually. Judith is my beloved stranger. At one point, prompted by Euripides, she cries out “No more borders!” Can we listen to her?
‘Hardy’s great original theme of talent cruelly denied, a beautiful soul betrayed, is still there’