London is having quite the month for stars on stage. Hot on the heels of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opening at @sohoplace, it is the turn of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever at Wyndham’s Theatre, the neighbour to the building that bears his name. What makes this revival so appealing is the casting of Christine Baranski in her long-awaited West End debut alongside Richard E. Grant.
Emily Burns pretty much plays it safe, choosing to mount a beautiful production of one of Coward’s earliest plays rather than play with the form or do anything radical with it. Purists will love it, while others may wonder whether Hay Fever still feels relevant in the modern world.
Coward based the central Bliss family on a real family he met in New York. Judith is a former stage actress, married to David, a novelist with a dubious amount of talent, and together they have two grown children, Simon and Sorel. In Hay Fever, each of them invites a guest to spend the weekend at their grand country home, although none of the others knows anyone else is coming.
So, with a house full of strangers, the Bliss family do what they do best: play party games and dramatise everything, leading their guests to wonder quite what they’ve let themselves in for.
Of course, all this, alongside Coward’s sparkling writing, makes for a very funny play. But this production does not always seem to realise that, at least in the first act, which lacks the momentum needed to get the audience truly on side.
The second act fares much better, and it feels as though everyone has settled in. The scenes are better paced and the witty lines and put-downs come thick and fast. Finally, it begins to feel like the frothy delight we were expecting.
Baranski makes an admirable West End debut. No stranger to comedy, her timing is superb, and the withering lines roll off her tongue with ease. This is perhaps a less flamboyant Judith Bliss than we might be used to, but the character does not suffer for it. Instead, Baranski’s camera-trained subtlety leans more into realism than farce.
Flamboyance is abundant with Richard E. Grant, on the other hand. His energy is instantly recognisable, heightened by a physical elegance that makes him impossible to ignore whenever he is on stage. Whether Grant and Baranski have the chemistry required is less clear-cut. Sometimes there is a glimmer of it; at other times it feels noticeably absent.
Will Close and Ophelia Lovibond, as Simon and Sorel, capture that brother-sister dynamic beautifully, and their boundless enthusiasm helps keep the energy up. Meanwhile, the supporting cast of house guests, Nancy Carroll, Charles Edwards, Ash Hunter and Lucy Karczewski, frequently threaten to steal the show from their celebrity co-stars.
A theatrical family should have a theatrical home, and set designer Frankie Bradshaw has very cleverly used Wyndham’s Theatre itself as the inspiration for the Bliss homestead. When the curtain rises it is genuinely difficult to tell where theatre ends and set begins, the country house mirroring the auditorium’s design right down to the smallest decorative details.
Bradshaw’s costumes are equally exquisite, particularly the gowns worn by Baranski, which perfectly capture Judith’s determination to remain the star of every room she enters.
Hay Fever may not be a revelatory reinvention of Coward’s classic, but it is a handsome, entertaining revival elevated by a game cast and a magnetic central performance from Christine Baranski. The first act takes a little too long to find its rhythm, yet once it does the production delivers plenty of laughs and reminds us why Coward’s portrait of artistic egos and social chaos has endured for more than a century.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
