Hay Fever

Description

First produced in 1925, Hay Fever is technically a masterpiece. A comedy of bad manners which starts with the arrival of four guests, invited independently by different members of the Bliss family for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead. The promise of an idyllic and peaceful weekend is quickly trounced by the self-absorbed eccentricities of the family who leave the guests to slink away humiliated, embarrassed and abandoned. "It does not date... it is in the highest mood of fantastic comedy, it is deliciously heartless and therefore delicioiusly alive and fresh" The Times

Noel Coward was born in 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex. He made his name as a playwright with The Vortex (1924), in which he also appeared. His numerous other successful plays included Fallen Angels (1925), Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1933), Design for Living (1933) and Blithe Spirit (1941). During the war he wrote screenplays such as Brief Encounter (1944) and In Which We Serve (1942). In the fifties he began a new career as a cabaret entertainer. He published volumes of verse and a novel (Pomp and Circumstance, 1960), two volumes of autobiography and four volumes of short stories: To Step Aside (1939), Star Quality (1951), Pretty Polly Barlow (1964) and Bon Voyage (1967). He was knighted in 1970 and died three years later in Jamaica.

'No one in modern English comedy boasts a more seductively comic or escapist approach to life than the self-absorbed family in Noel Coward's Hay Fever Coward celebrates the value, enchantment and absurdity of escaping from life into theatrics.' Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 17.4.09 'Coward's Hay Fever, like the allergy, is always with us.' Michael Billington, Guardian, 17.4.09 'Hay Fever was written in a spirit as fresh and cutting as new-mown lawn. It's an affectionate and arch portrait of Berkshire bohemians behaving badly. Politeness and Restraint are not this play's middle names.' Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph, 17.4.09