The Withered Arm: Stage 1. Thomas Hardy

A woman and a man… words of love whispered on a summer night. Later, there is a child, but no wedding-ring. And then the man leaves the first woman, finds a younger woman, marries her… It’s an old story.
Yes, it’s an old, old story. It happens all the time — today, tomorrow, a hundred years ago. People don’t change. But this story, set among the green hills of southern England, has something different about it. Perhaps it is only a dream, or perhaps it is magic — a kind of strange dark magic that begins in the world of dreams and phantoms…