Hay Fever

Downstage Theatre Noel Coward

Dir. Anthony Taylor

"One always plays up to mother in this house; it's a sort of unwritten law," explains Sorel Bliss in Noel Coward's play Hay Fever now being performed at Downstage. The Blisses are a family of Jazz Age aesthetes who invite four embodiments of establishment values down for the weekend. "Playing up," entails an obstinate refusal to admit that anything is, but what is not - a perverse creed which vastly disconcerts their guests. This consternation at a world where reality is only important as a catalyst for fantasy is the basis for most of the play's humour.

Judith Bliss, for example, is unperturbed by the impropriety of either her husband's invitation to a society chit or her own to a narcissistic young boxer. She prefers instead to blast out of all proportion the slight indiscretions into which she and her family tempt their guests. "We shall have to tell David everything," she proclaims, apropos nothing, to the hapless Richard (not of course her own guest, but that of her daughter). Meanwhile her son has felt it necessary to propose to his father's flapper. "He suddenly kissed me, and rushed into the house and said we were engaged - and that hateful Judith asked me to make him happy," she explains distractedly later.

Raymond Boyce's chaotic, split-level set is in the spirit of this confusion, with the extravagantly clad Blisses and their guests swirling about in a disorientating world of glistening kitsch. The strobe fighting and moody jazz which start and conclude each Act maintain this unsettling atmosphere. In an ambitious attempt to further jolt his audience Director Anthony Taylor introduces the incongruity of the surly, dishevelled maid Clara who tramps mattly about the shining avant-garde set.

Contempt for Truth

The Bliss's blatant disregard for reality is contrasted with the more dangerous and insidious contempt for truth involved in their guest's conventional attitudes. "I do hope you meant that," Judith sweetly inquires of Richard who has been assuring her of the continuance of her charms. Myra, the son's guest, disparages the Bliss's non-observance of forms; "It's useless to wait for introductions with the Blisses..." but, after correctly introducing herself, makes no attempt to get to know anyone.

The guests are divided into those who are simply bewildered and those who attempt to resist the Bliss's fantastic regime. Sandy, the boxer, and Jackie, the flapper, soon lapse into ignominious incomprehension. Richard is less easy to place; Paul Gittins plays him as a gauche diplomat whose fatuousness has him in the nonplussed camp, but it might have given the play a better balance if, at least initially, he had interpretted the part more strongly - setting Richard's slick diplomacy against the exuberance of his hosts. Myra does not capitulate so readily, condemning the Blisses in the hectic closing scene of Act 2 as, "posing, self-centred egotists."

This climactic scene, in which even Myra's resistance is finally broken down, is the finest thing in the play. It is the utterly right culmination to the masterly heightening of tension in this Act: the game of adverbs with Its merging of reality and fantasy; the Monty Pythonesque comfy chair routine; and the final master stroke in which the Blisses, on Richard's unwitting cue line, switch alarmingly from reality to one of Judith's old melodramas, leaving the guests gasping at all manner of incestuous implications.

It would be nice then if Hay Fever could be tidily explained as an exultation of the Bliss's emancipation from the conventions which stifle their guests. Unfortunately it is not so simple - the Bliss's imaginings do not in fact point the way to a more important reality behind the conventional facade. Judith's melodramatic flights of fancy highlight the absurdity of correct behaviour not by breaking free from it but by ludicrously adhering to it.

Coward Frivilous

If there is no essential difference between the Blisses and their guests must the play then be dismissed as just frivilous entertainment - the manipulation of reality and fantasy simply a device to hype up the plot? I'm not sure. At the risk of reading too much into the play I would however suggest that a call to arms is not essential to serious drama. Hay Fever can be seen as a pessimistic play, satirising the absurdities of mannered society, but not offering any hope for improvement. Convention, as Ambrose Bierce remarked about fashion, being a despot whom the wise ridicule and obey. This decadent attitude might not appeal to blinkered optimists but it is not for that reason trivial. If anything the play falls down not because it is a polished trifle, but because it is not polished enough. Coward dashed the play off in three days and it shows. The hackneyed patter in to which the dialogue sometimes degenerates can perhaps be justified as realistic in the case of the guests, but the eccentricity of the Blisses offered ample scope for the exercise of wit. The humour in particular is unnecessarily stressed. When Myra peevishly observes during the adverb game that Judith is at an advantage, "having been a professional so long," it is surely unnecessary for Judith to reply, "I don't like 'so long' very much."

The exuberance of the Downstage production however largely conceals these defects on stage. Bruce Phillips is ripping as the keen young boxer while in the lead role Tina Grenville catches both the phoney magnificence Of Judith's ranting and the pathos underlying it. Don't be deterred by Coward's reputation as a light-weight but go and see this innovative and relevant production of his play.

David Beach.