Three Wessex Tales

by Thomas Hardy, Colin Haydn Evans (Adaptation)

1. The Fiddler of the Reels

Car'line Aspent: Janet Dale
Ned Hipcroft: Stephen Tomlin
Watt Ollamoor: Struan Rodger
Carry: Bethan Ganjavi
Music: Dave Swarbrick

2. The Melancholy Hussar

Phyllis Grove: Moir Leslie
Dr Grove: Simon Carter
Humphrey Gould: Andrew Wincott
MatthSus Tina: Neal Foster
Music: John Kirkpatrick

3. The Withered Arm

Rhoda: Janet McTeer
Jack: Janet Dale
Gertrude: Kathryn Hurlbutt
Thomas Lodge: Graham Padden
Conjurer Trendle: Roger Hume
Hangman: Bill Wallis
Music: John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris

Radio Drama

Published June 1, 1990

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.