Hay Fever

Noel Coward had just made his first real breakthrough – playing drug-addled bad boy Nicky Lancaster in The Vortex in 1924 – when this delightful comedy of weekend guests and bad manners, Hay Fever opened to notices which referred to the play variously as being “dull, amusing, thin, slight, tedious, witty and brittle”.

All of these epithets could be fairly applied to Peter Hall’s revival depending on your mood or disposition. But none of them would be sufficient to describe the glorious performance of Judi Dench as Judith Bliss, the retired actress who distils each moment of everyday social life into its theatrical possibility. Dame Judi takes the role by the scruff of the neck and shakes it into a sort of hectic vivacity, displaying the monstrosity of her ego with a speed and gravity, ensuring the play bristles with laughter.

Judith and her philandering husband, David (a suave, perfectly attired Peter Bowles), and their two spoilt children, Sorel and Simon (a beefy Kim Medcalf and a quivering Dan Stevens), have each invited a separate guest as a lamb for the slaughter. These hapless outsiders are ignored, insulted, humiliated in charades and finally abandoned. The genius of the play lies in its self-conscious theatricality, so that when Judith evokes the “thrill of a first night” with the critics “all leaning forward with glowing faces, receptive and exultant” she is both dramatising herself and commenting – acidly – on the result.

Dench steps downstage at such points and wrestles the play to the ground almost savagely. No Judith Bliss before has been so ruthlessly hilarious – Dench’s dottiness and distraction are resonant and highly developed mannerisms, not signs of character weakness.

Otherwise, the production, unexceptionally designed by Simon Higlett, is straightforward, with some astute, frenetic acting from Charles Edwards as the besotted Sandy Tyrell and a nice line in befuddled dignity from William Chubb as the diplomatist Richard Greatham.

Nothing on the periphery compares with the glamour and surprise element in the performances of Maggie Smith and Lynn Redgrave in the National’s famous 1964 revival – Belinda Lang’s Myra Arundel, who allegedly goes around using sex as a shrimping net, is a fairly one-note vamp, while Olivia Darnley’s chubby flapper, Jackie Coryton, is a little too subdued and submerged.

I loved the Gothic weirdness and extremity of Declan Donnellan’s version in Coward’s centenary year, and Hall has lifted a few ideas from that, playing up the thunderclaps in the final act and allowing Lin Blakley’s housemaid Clara to launch (unwisely, I think) into an extended, operatic rendition of “Tea for Two”. But the show must be seen for the brilliance and no-nonsense artistry of its leading lady, our delightful dame of the calceolarias.

– Michael Coveney