Walk into Wyndham’s Theatre and Frankie Bradshaw’s set hits you straight away. It is gorgeous: a light-filled 1920s Berkshire drawing room packed with faded rugs, French windows, and a grand piano. Visually, it sets a beautiful scene for director Emily Burns’s revival.
Noël Coward famously knocked off Hay Fever in three days back in 1924, and a hundred years on, the structural flimsiness really shows. To put it bluntly, there is almost no plot. The four self-centred Blisses each secretly invite a guest down for the weekend without warning the others. What follows is three acts of social friction, bad manners, and endless theatrical posturing. Where it once felt like a biting satire of artistic narcissism, much of the material now feels distinctly dated. The middle act’s excruciating tea party and the game drag on for far too long, and jokes that might have shocked early audiences now draw only polite chuckles.
If the comedy feels a bit dusty, the acting at least keeps things moving. In her West End debut, Christine Baranski is a force as the retired stage diva Judith Bliss, gliding around in silks and treating every minor inconvenience like a tragedy at the Comédie-Française. Richard E. Grant brings a frantic, twitchy vanity to her novelist husband, David. Their theatrical adult children are played with sharp energy by Ophelia Lovibond (a deliciously self-aware Sorel) and Will Close (a moody, petulant Simon), while Jo McInnes earns solid laughs as the long-suffering housekeeper Clara.
The four unsuspecting guests, trapped in this domestic nightmare, are equally well-handled. Nancy Carroll gives Myra Arundel a crisp, sleek edge; Charles Edwards is suitably stuffy as the diplomat Richard Greatham; Ash Hunter brings easy charm to Sandy Tyrell; and Lucy Karczewski is the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Jackie Coryton.
Burns directs with clean, efficient pacing, but all the talent on stage cannot hide the fact that Coward’s farce lacks real bite today. It makes for an agreeable, handsome evening out, but it feels far more like a carefully kept period piece than a genuinely funny night at the theatre.
It runs until 12 December. Tickets: here.
Photos: Marc Brenner