Noel Coward’s youthful writing surge produced dozens of plays, the perennially popular Hay Fever, premiered in 1925, among them. A century on, this classic rep piece is back yet again, now given the A-list treatment at Wyndham’s.
The production’s budget shows from the off. The Blisses’ riverside home in Cookham, Berks has become a grand mansion with chandeliers and modish Italianate furniture (set design is by Frankie Bradshaw). Oddly, though, its living-room door seems to open straight onto the driveway outside. And the house’s generous proportions are at odds with its human cargo, the sole member of staff keeping it running being grumpy Clara (Jo McInnes), dresser to the lady of the house and former stage-star, Judith (Christine Baranski). The stage also has to accommodate a strip of garden outside its lavish windows, a baby grand piano and an easel for Judith’s son Simon (Will Close, pictured below) to paint at.
The women in the cast are dressed equally lavishly (again by Bradshaw) in outfits created with yards of flounces in luxury fabrics. When a flapper girl, Jackie (Lucy Kraczewski), arrives for the weekend, her dress is a marvel, an exquisite bright pink number with a frosted top layer. Later she turns up for dinner in a dress whose skirt seems inspired by the scales of a stegosaurus, whereas Sorrel (Ophelia Lovibond), Judith’s daughter, is kitted out in a teal outfit with gaucho pants buried under the mad ruching of its lower half. Only another visitor, Myra (Nancy Carroll), sports maturer styles with cleaner, subtler lines. Judith’s outfits, however, are oddly unmemorable, pale, long and slinky, though topped with a noteworthy outsize straw hat.
Judith, recently retired, has never left the stage: she is always “on”, turning everything and anything for an excuse to reprise the melodramatic excesses of her triumphs, notably the play Love’s Whirlwind. In this she is joined by her two children and even her husband, novelist David (Richard E Grant), whose labours are said to be the financial mainstay of the family’s lifestyle. All have acquired the habit of turning a minor turn of events into a major drama, often at some unfortunate's expense.
The play’s toying with these big theatrical gestures perhaps partly explains its popularity. Judith has been a significant magnet for leading ladies on both sides of the Pond, so it’s no surprise that one of America’s most enduring actresses, Christine Baranski, has moved over to join the otherwise all-British cast. Her English accent is almost flawless, but it feels studied too, and you suspect its accuracy comes at the expense of a degree of comfort she might feel in the role if allowed to use her natural voice. Is there a good reason why she isn’t portrayed as a transatlantic transplant?
The problem is that Judith needs to have several “English” voices: not just the tone of an exasperated mother whose family drive her mad, but also the histrionic grande dame one she assumes when re-enacting dialogue from Love’s Whirlwind, and at first this distinction isn’t obvious. As the play goes on, and the action grows increasingly silly and chaotic, Baranski begins to hit the right notes — especially funny are the low growls both she and Carroll’s Myra adopt for saying the phrase “So old” — and the performer that fans adore for her cool, crisp repartee emerges.
Is this enough for Judith Bliss, though? I found Baranski just a bit too well behaved for the role, but maybe director Emily Burns can coax her to go more OTT as the run goes on. She’s up against the sharpest of English actors in Nancy Carroll and Charles Edwards (as "diplomatist" Richard, pictured above with Carroll), both giving masterclasses in snappy articulation and less-is-more comedy. Lucy Karczewski, a standout in the West End Stereophonic, is also impressive as the winsome flapper Jackie, dim but adorable. Of the men, Will Close (barely recognisable as Dear England’s Harry Kane) is a plausible Simon, lazy and louche, while Richard E Grant is Richard E Grant, but a neat fit with the basically affable personality of David Bliss.
My inner cynic is still unconvinced that this play, however entertaining, is more than a youthful experiment in playing with a simple proposition: what happens if a family of people who love to play-act end up stuck in the same house in the country for 24 hours with four mismatched strangers? “Is this a game?” asks one of the characters in a Bliss family concocted melodrama. The question is repeated by a desperate Richard, who doesn’t even understand what the game is when he really is involved in one. In more recent times, the line where reality shades into something more manipulated is one playwrights (Albee, Mamet, Pinter, Anthony Schaffer) have probed to chilling effect, but in Coward’s early catalogue it’s not a question with sharp claws: it's a pure comedy of bad manners, with no sinister outcome or psychological depth. The manipulated guests can simply pack up and drive away. But the odour of mothballs is becoming inescapable.
