Spine: "I want to control my life like I control my music."
Physical: Jerome is male, probably in his late thirties or early forties (13-year-old child + 20-30 years prior). Ayckbourn never describes his physical appearance, so he is probably fairly unremarkable -- a middle-class Everyman, like so many of Ayckbourn's characters. If Jerome were the avante-garde artist type, some character would probably comment on it, so he must look fairly conventional. Maybe on the tall and slender side, from all those futuristic TV dinners, and certainly "rumpled" looking, from four years as a depressed, frustrated bachelor in a neglected, messy apartment. We do know that he rarely smiles.
Sociological:: Jerome is upper-middle class, white and Anglo-Saxon, Protestant/Anglican if anything but probably atheistic or agnostic, a professional composer with an impressive array of electronic equipment with which to ply his trade. He must have either large savings or extensive royalties coming in, since he hasn't written a new piece in the four years since his wife and daughter left him and peforms no other work than occasionally setting up the sound system for concerts by the local street gang. He is intelligent and well-educated, if indolent -- he won't repair his door intercom, though he can competently repair and adjust the NAN 300F android. (Though, even then, he neglects to set her clock to the proper time, merely relaxing with "You're better than you were." (p. 8)
Jerome's family/home life is virtually non-existent. His wife and child are gone, and he is no longer allowed to see or even speak with them. In fact, he hasn't talked to any live human being in the months since they fully automated the local hypermart (p. 37). The only "being" he communicates with is the child-minder robot NAN 300F, who he has dressed up to look like his ex-wife Corinna, making "her" an odd, semi-functional parody of the faithful housewife.
Jerome has a former friend, Lupus, part of an "old gang" (p. 54) of presumably musical friends. Lupus is similarly down on his luck, though Jerome ignores his frequent pleas for an ear to hear him out, or a shoulder to cry on. (Indeed, the T-shirt we first see Lupus wearing, "Music Is A Living Thing," seems a deliberate counterpoint to Jerome's callous, unfeeling use of snippets of people's everyday sounds, taken unawares and then mechanically processed, to make his version of music. A plea for acoustic, non-computer-driven instrumentation?).
Jerome's only amusements or hobbies seem to be music and his continual efforts to keep Nan running. He ignores virtually everything else. Indeed, his sound system is the first thing we see on the darkened stage, the entire apartment ("including the coffee table") is part of his recording and composing gear, and it is with this equipment that he spends his final moments in the play.
Intellectual/Psychological: Jerome's moral standards are rather aberrant, at least to his contemporaries. He continually records every moment of sound in his apartment (not even the bathroom, or the bedroom during sex, are sacrosanct) and uses them for his compositions, to be performed publicly. As Zoë protests, "You can't see that there are things that people say and do with each other that they don't want other people to hear? And if they think that other people are going to be listening, then they just don't say them anymore?" Jerome's art has caused his public and private worlds to be muddled. And people flee that confusion.
Jerome's ambition is to "express the feeling of love in an abstract musical form. In such a way that anyone who hears it -- anyone -- no matter what language they speak -- no matter what creed or colour -- they will recognize it -- and respond to it -- and relate it to their own feelings of love that they have or they've experienced at some time -- so they say -- yes, my God, that's it! That's what it is!" (p. 39) Yet even this is a public exposure of a private, individual human emotion. Moreover, Jerome seems to believe that people are like machines, with buttons to be pushed for certain results. Public and private, individual and multitude, are again confused.
Jerome also wants his daughter Geain back. But he does not so much want her as his image of her. "What have you done with my little girl? I want my little girl." (p. 79). He has not seen Geain in four years, and in his mind she is still the nine-year-old moppet who loves her "Daddy" absolutely, without thought, question, or objection -- the love he cannot, with all his composing peccadilloes, receive from Zoë or Corinna.
Jerome's temperament seems likewise affected by his long association with his machines. He pays little attention to social pleasantries with new acquaintances (Zoë Mill and Mervyn Bickerdyke), and seems to assume that everyone knows what he does. His first words to Zoë are "You've left my front door open.... [closes it] Never leave my front door open." (p. 10). He assumes Zoë knows about the Daughters of Darkness street gang, and speaks shortly to her during their clothes-changing negotiations. He becomes infuriated when visitors don't realize that he has unlocked the front door -- but he has never bothered to fix his intercom, so there is no way they could know that the door is unlocked. Again, the assumption that others, like machines, are instantly aware of his actions, his button-presses.
Character Lines:
Character Relationships: Jerome is most involved with Nan, in the sense that she is always around him and he accepts her most easily. But she is not really a person, so she may or may not count. In a sense, he becomes most "involved" with Zoë -- they have sex offstage in Act I -- but they never really connect, as his invasion of her privacy shows. Zoë is ultimately only a source of sounds and material for Nan's masquerade. Jerome is, if anything, most distant from Lupus. The two never exchange words once in the play: Lupus appears only on video, and is ignored by virtually everyone in the play. Indeed, is seems sure that Jerome carried on an affair with Lupus' wife Deborah (and then recorded his wife's reactions to it!).
Jerome was evidently very close to the young Geain, but he nearly rejects his teenaged daughter, and doubts his own capacity for taking care of her. He despises Mervyn Bickerdyke, the stereotypically foolish and puffed-up civil service official: "If we're having to rely on decisions from people like you, matey, what's it matter anyway? The ship's already sinking." (p. 86). Perhaps it is Deborah who Jerome feels most about -- at first she is "a selfish, vindictive, unforgiving bitch" (p. 29), but by the end of the play he is willing to give it another try with her. Only his emotional isolation and mad quest for a "love composition" foil his second chance.
Polar Changes: The tragedy of Henceforward... lies in the fact that Jerome almost changes, but ultimately does not. We believe for a moment that he will leave with Deborah and Geain, and perhaps even reform into a giving human being. But at the last, his ingrained habits take over: he destroys all his chances, and is left completely alone.
Opposition Forces: Again, Mervyn and Corinna seem from the start to be the opposition forces, but prove to be nothing of the sort: Corinna would welcome Jerome's help in raising Geain. It is Jerome's isolation and lack of empathy that foil his quest to regain his daughter, when he stays in his apartment at the end.
Resolution: In an Ayckbournian twist, Jerome gets what he wants (his "love" composition), but in the last moments of the play realizes that, indeed, it was NOT what he really wanted. ("He sits all alone. And realizes how alone he is." p. 98).
Appearance: Jerome probably leads with is head -- he is intellectual, not emotional. He probably is dressed very casually, even frumpily, in the first scene (he doesn't even remember that Zoë is coming to visit). In the second scene he is certainly dressed up to make a good impression -- "He, too, has made a great effort with his appearance." (p. 54). Still, he probably has a few wrinkles in his dress shirt.
Selected comments by Alan Ayckbourn about Henceforward..., from Ian Waton's book Conversations with Ayckbourn (Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1988)
"In this case, in the end I was writing about one or two themes I have obviously touched on before: what people do to other people, particularly men to women, and also, something I haven't covered before, the nature of the creative artist, and his relationship with reality, and people, and those he purports to love." (p. 146)
"Jerome had a mechanical woman, which had huge comic potential, but which was also a very telling image in itself.... The important thing was that the man was having increasing difficulty telling real people from machines, and was really showing a more and more marked preference for the machine.... And we could be moving into an age where people relate only to screens, and find them preferable, because, in fact, they are much more logical and much more reliable.... Computers are, on the one hand, quite reassuringly constant (unless they crash, as they say) but, on the other hand, they're awfully dangerous because you don't, in the end, get anything back from them. No conflict and no criticism." (p. 147)
"And I could picture him sitting there, doing this -- in a sense, completely irrelevant -- work.... There could be people attempting to keep a candle of civilization alight, saying, 'Well, somebody's got to be writing music, even if nobody wants to listen to it.'" (p. 148)
"But the question is more: is it possible to be an artist -- albeit a composer or a writer, particularly, I suspect -- and still live a normal life, still have normal relationships? The deeper those relationships go, the more you are liable to use them in your work, simply because they're there and feature very strongly in the centre of your life. By using them in your work, does it make it easier or more difficult to live those relationships any further? ...It's rather like -- to use a crude example -- making love to your wife and then showing the snapshots round the bar afterwards, saying, 'This is what she's like, fellas.'" (p. 148)
"The use of music within theatre is interesting. I use it in Henceforward..., and that is probably the most satisfactory blend I've had, because it's got an irony and a non-sentimentality about it, which is what I was looking for." (p. 129)