MAKING HAY
This had to be a short-run red hot sellout, didn’t it? Richard E Grant taking his air of wicked unreliable comedity back after 20 years tothe West End, while actually thrilling couch potatoes in Traitors. And it’s Hay Fever, the comedy of appalling boho-showbiz manners which Noel Coward pretended he wrote im tnree days but actually – as the great Soden biography reveals – was crafted and notebooked like a Swiss watch, every drop dead line and narcissistic fantasy worked with exasperated love.
Love not least of theatre : the thing to remember about Coward is that he was a child actor, a hard worker from a precarious background, no spoilt nepo but a longtime watcher and taker of notes about his theatrical confreres’ behaviour and relationships.
So Judith Bliss, the diva matriarch, her wearily reclusive husband and their definitely spoilt young-adult kids have a reality beyond sitcom, all the funnier for his dry observation. And we all love watching people who are talented and successful but also ,frankly, a bit awful. And EmilyBurns’ cast is well fitted to express this . Chriatine Baranski, a Broadway Emmy star, was quite new to me: alongside the other almost aglow with glee at behaving the way hardworking actors rarely dare. It’s Baranski’s West end debut indeed. I rather took to her, admiring the definitely-older diva style and oldfashioned actressy RP accent. Some claim her vowels are too carefully-trained US but to me , with emories of 70 years, they actually felt retro: placing the play audibly as much as the sumptuous country house set places it, 1020s class nicely defined in the too- shiny brass and the Bliss family not having enough household staff or bathrooms.
Baranski falls easily too into Judith Bliss’ melodramatic theatricality, w whether cooing in the “beautiful and kind” moment lampooned by her, joining the others in re enacting her old parts or, in the diabolic second half, dragging the bewildered visitorsin. Coward achieves proper contemporary professional mockery too, in his relish of the imagined one where “you pretend to cheat at cards to save yourhusbands name”. Think Wilde and Bouciccault..
Grant at first has little tomdo beyond stuming downstairs in a crumpled suit ccomplaining, but comes gloriously into his own as he is drawn into teasing the guests and the finaly furious row: glorious. And amid the other nicely cast and physicalllyand elegantly timed players here’s a bow to the matchless Charles Edwarda as the poor diplomat. The way his suit jacket it buttoned all the way ames your heart break for him when you realize heis fated to be alone with Judith in that lethal drawingroom. And who better than Nancy Carroll as Myra, the only guest who is up to them all?
Wyndhamstheatre.co.uk. to 12 dec
