HAY FEVER. To 16 August.
Manchester.
HAY FEVER
by Noel Coward.
Royal Exchange Theatre To 16 August 2008.
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Runs 2hr 30min Two intervals.
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833.
www.royalexchangehtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 July.
Elegant if slightly uneven Coward revival.
For a full-length play Hay Fever is quite short, so it makes sense to play it, as intended, with the two intervals which modern productions rarely provide. It certainly helps the structure, something director Greg Hersov also indicates through Sorel, daughter in the four-part artistic family who each, unknown to the rest of the family, invite a weekend house-guest to their Cookham country home.
Hersov gives prominence to Sorel’s complaint that her family is never normal. Amid the comedy Coward creates from each Bliss ignoring everyone but their own guest (until each falls for one of the others), it’s easy to forget their outrageous behaviour isn’t so much based on deliberate rudeness as upon an inability to bother about anything that’s not their own immediate concern.
The shifting moods are reflected in the varying appearance of Fiona Button’s Sorel. Before the guests arrive she stands under her mop of brilliant white hair. By the second-act’s evening, with the ill-assorted all assembled, she’s radiant in a ginger wig. For Sunday morning breakfast, as the family bickers on and the guests escape unnoticed, the white hair’s back. But the legs are no longer sheathed in silky stockings; bare, they reflect the morning brightness.
It’s suitable a Coward comedy should be registered in terms of fashion and appearance. The surface is what you see and pretty much all you get. Though the revival lacks some of Coward’s desired lightness of manner, a lot of care’s gone into appearances, including the warm detail of furnishings and textures in the Bliss household as designed by Ashley Martin-Davis.
There’s a lot of good in the performances too, Belinda Lang never overplaying Judith’s grande dame of the stage. The family’s spontaneous indulgence in extracts from her old hit Love’s Whirlwind further clamp them into their inward-looking traditions.
Ben Keaton isn’t a natural Coward performer. He can blur words, but his manner, with its breezy abandon, gives an individuality to Judith’s novelist husband. Among the guests, Simon Bubb’s hapless Sandy and Lysette Anthony’s Myra, the only one familiar with, and ready to stand up to, Blissland, are notable.
Judith Bliss: Belinda Lang.
David Bliss: Ben Keaton.
Sorel Bliss: Fiona Button.
Simon Bliss: Chris New.
Jackie Coryton: Dorothea Myer-Bennett.
Sandy Tyrrell: Simon Bubb.
Myra Arundel: Lysette Anthony.
Richard Greatham: Simon Treves.
Clara: Tessa Bell-Briggs.
Director: Greg Hersov.
Designer: Ashley Martin-Davis.
Lighting: Chris Davey.
Sound: Steve Brown.
2008-07-31 09:37:22