February 20, 2007
There is a sense of the Hegelian dialectic to the three-act play. Act One is the status quo, Act Two the shouty revolution and Act Three the new-found, often pap, synthesis. This is wonderfully turned on its head by Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, presented at the Playhouse in a production originally seen last year at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
The Bliss family lives in latent splendid isolation next to the Thames at Cookham. Judith has retired from a glittering career on the London stage, her husband is, if he is to be believed, a terrible novelist. The framing device essential to the play is one of multiple othernesses: Cookham is not London, home is not the theatre, and the drawing room of the country house is not the Japanese bedroom, the potential occupation of which causes much of the first act’s conflict. With each family member having invited a guest to occupy this best guestroom, there is no hope of a peaceful weekend for anyone, or of the Blisses allowing their guests to maintain their full sanity, dignity, or mental composure.
As Judith, Stephanie Beacham acts her co-stars off the stage, including Christopher Timothy, whose portrayal of David Bliss is for the most part muted and deserving of much praise but is apt to be swallowed up by the sheer raucousness of his fellow players. The tone of drawing room comedy, even one as subversive as Coward’s, must be established in the first scene, which is here clumsily handled by Madeleine Hutchins as Sorel and William Ellis as her brother Simon, who are being alternately wooden and whiny. They both improve greatly, however, after their mother’s entrance and get better still in the second act, which is composed of the most laugh-filled forty-five minutes in English theatre. Sarah Berger, as middle-aged maneater Myra Arundel is the most standout of the houseguests, but Andrew Hall, fondly remembered as Russell in Carla Lane’s Butterflies, gives a rigidity to the part of ‘diplomacist’ Greatham that is greatly entertaining.
The frocks and flannels are impeccable and are filled well by the beautiful cast. The set speaks of the Maidenhead of Kind Hearts and Coronets more than the artistic bohemia we are led by the guests to believe the Blisses inhabit, but self-delusion is the family’s game so we might be satisfied that the house is as it is because Judith is in the country playing at being the squire’s wife and there are, nonetheless, pictures of naked women in the guest lavatory.
Revived by Joe Harmston, this production was directed in London by Peter Hall who is responsible for bringing much excellent theatre to the Playhouse, where he was a resident director in the 1950s. This production might best be described as comfortable, rather than challenging, but it is truly a comfortable success made of a play in which the staging, thanks to the sheer quality of the words and their delivery, can be allowed to take a back seat.