Malignant Eye

By Gerald Clarke

THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE PBS, beginning Sept. 3

"I 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's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not an easy tale, in short, but it is a powerful one, as hypnotically seductive as an an gry, malignant eye.

As in all of 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.

But no one can 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 in one of the series' most dramatic scenes. The only force that can down him is that beating within himself.

Bates naturally dominates, but the rest of the cast also demonstrates the high competence of craft we have come to expect from "Masterpiece Theater."

The seven-part series was shot in Hardy's own Dorset, and the accents sound suitably provincial. So suitable, indeed, that many Americans might wish for subtitles; it takes a keen ear to sort out all the vagaries of the Southwest Country dialect. But accent is not the main problem with this solid, dutiful adaptation. The main fault is pace, or the lack of it. Director David Giles moves Hardy's improbabilities with all too probable slowness. Despite Bates, Hardy and the best efforts of everyone else, TV's Mayor of Casterbridge is only occasionally exciting.

--Gerald Clarke

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