Dench, Hall & Kenwright Have Hay Fever???
Date: 14 June 2005
Dame Judi Dench, now one of only 65 people in the country who can call themselves one of the Queen's Companions of Honour (See News, 13 Jun 2005), may be back in the West End in the new year. She's tipped to return to the Theatre Royal Haymarket (where she last appeared with fellow Dame Maggie Smith in David Hare’s sell-out The Breath of Life in 2002) to star in a new production of Hay Fever. The Noel Coward revival would reunite her with director Peter Hall (who she last worked with on The Royal Family, also at the Haymarket, in 2001) - and, interestingly, would reunite him with his one-time producer Bill Kenwright. Hall and Kenwright teamed up regularly in the 1990s, presenting 16 plays in seven years. But the pair famously fell out when Hall signed up to another producer’s revival of Amadeus at the Old Vic in 1998 and have not worked together since. First performed in 1925, Hay Fever is a comedy of manners, inspired by the eccentric American actress Laurette Taylor, and her husband Hartley, and written by Coward in just three days. In the play, a bohemian actress and her writer husband live in a rural haven with their precocious son and daughter. When various guests are invited down for the weekend, they become pawns in the family’s emotional, madcap games.
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