After Anthony Page’s ponderous, curiously unsexy production of Design for Living at the Old Vic, I began to wonder if I was tired of Coward. Happily, Stephen Unwin’s richly enjoyable, beautifully designed revival of Hay Fever (1925) has restored my faith. This comedy of bad manners, in which a family of insufferably self-regarding bohemians treat their more conventional guests with abominable rudeness at a weekend house party, is played with the speed and lightness of touch that eluded Page, warming up an initially frosty Monday-night audience until it was drawn into a shared conspiracy of laughter and pleasure.
There is a splendid clipped precision about Coward’s dialogue, and the constant realisation that the characters are actually thinking very different things from the banal platitudes they actually utter. No wonder Harold Pinter, superficially such a contrasting dramatist, happily acknowledged Coward as a major influence.
The play, in which the Bliss family’s houseguests are so ingeniously humiliated with parlour games and floridly faked amorous intrigues before being ignored altogether, also strikes me as a forerunner of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Coward’s play is less savage, of course, but his comedy of Get the Guests has a similar ruthlessness about it.
Among the cast, Celia Imrie hilariously captures the posing, preening self-regard of the retired actress Judith Bliss, who lives her life as if starring in a second-rate melodrama, while Alexandra Gilbreath brings hilarious poise and venom to the role of the vampish Myra Arundel, memorably described as “using sex as a sort of shrimping net”. The star turn, however, comes from Adrian Lukis as a stuffy, strait-laced English diplomat whose physical awkwardness and desperate embarrassment as he finds himself entangled in the Bliss’s devious games is a comic joy to behold.
- Hay Fever (0871 230 1552)