Far from the Madding Crowd

Birmingham Royal Ballet: Natasha Oughtred as Bathsheba Everdene and Jamie Bond as Sergeant Francis Troy; photo: Bill Cooper

MUSIC Paul Reade
DESIGNS Hayden Griffin
LIGHTING Mark Jonathan

After the success of Hobson’s Choice and the pleasure we both had in its creation, Paul Reade and I were keen to work with each other again and shared ideas over the years, though none seemed to quite ‘click’. It was quite by accident then that we discovered a shared love of Thomas Hardy and quickly arrived at Madding Crowd as the most suitable of his novels for adaptation; the three would-be lovers of Bathsheba Everdene, a wealthy, older, obsessive landowner, a poor but ever loyal farmer and a self-centred soldier, each drawing from the heroine a different facet of her own personality.

Though I’ve never been drawn on the question, ‘what is my favourite amongst my own ballets?’, Crowd is certainly up there in my affections, and not least since it was the last piece Paul and I were to collaborate on before his untimely death.