She Opened the Door

Peter’s play is a fantasy set one afternoon in September 1895 when the manuscript for Jude the Obscure needs to be returned to the publisher. Emma is threatening to burn it in the garden of Max Gate and, but for the intervention of Thomas’s Mother, the Maid and ‘the Other Woman’, the book might be lost forever.

The play is witty, poetic and occasionally shocking, with hidden references and quotations from Hardy’s own works. Peter says, ‘I wanted to show that Hardy was truly a man of his time, a cutting-edge, contemporary writer, who was caught up in the feminist movement’. Peter’s attempt to understand something of the man by looking at the women who surrounded him is both original and ground-breaking.