Strange sort of classic, Hay Fever. Written when Noël Coward was an unknown actor, it won him no converts among producers. He couldn’t get anyone to stage it. The title is weak and vague. The script lacks incident and action. And the humour is more subtle than audiences were used to. Only after Coward had broken through with his auntie-blasting Oedipal shocker, The Vortex, could he find managers ready to take a second look at his back catalogue.
Hay Fever introduces us to a family of maddeningly self-indulgent Bohemians, the Blisses, whose home is swamped by a quartet of weekend guests. A gruesome house party follows. All the wrong people flirt with each other. A few hasty kisses and some overfrantic proposals ensue. Then everyone leaves and the Blisses carry on as before. That’s all that happens.
Howard Davies’s revival features a stunning and unconventional design by Bunny Christie. Dramatic V-shaped windows throw brilliant sunlight over a painter’s studio, where stacks of unused picture frames lean against a whitewashed wall. A rickety staircase with no bannister leads up to a carpetless balcony. The house’s main entrance looks suspiciously like the double doors of a garage. This fabulous array of dishevelled elegance is, I’m afraid to say, completely wrong. The setting is a drawing room in Cookham, not an artist’s lock-up in Stoke Newington. The Blisses live in the Home Counties for a reason. They belong there. Beneath all the drama-queen bluster and the look-at-me histrionics, they’re a perfectly conventional and rather correct family, so to portray them as a gang of hippie dropouts is to misconstrue part of the play’s psychology.
Never mind. Howard Davies’s zinging revival has plenty of warmth and style thanks to a cast who know just how to capture the crisp frivolity of the text and its undertow of sadness.
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