Hay Fever lightly chronicles the start of a weekend at a country house near London, property of the Bliss family -- David is a novelist, Judith is an actress who recently said her adieux to the London stage and their children Simon and Sorel have no identifiable professions or preoccupations. 

They all have artistic temperaments and a cheerful disregard for social niceties. As Sorel says to her brother in the first scene, "You're right about us being slapdash, Simon. I wish we weren't." His reply: "It's not our fault -- it's the way we've been brought up." 

That impulsiveness and disregard applies to relations within the family, as well. We quickly learn that each of the four has invited an acquaintance down for the weekend, without thinking to inform the others. Their visitors turn out to be a junior diplomat ("diplomatist"), a female social climber who "uses sex like a shrimping net," an amateur boxer with a motor car, and a "perfectly sweet flapper" who admires the novelist. 

The Bliss family is madcap and bohemian -- thence, perhaps, their bliss -- but like Noël Coward himself, they're self-made. The country place is a recent acquisition. Judith is out in the garden seeking to memorize the names of the plants. They have a single servant, the abrupt and overfamiliar Clara, who worked backstage as Judith's dresser. 

 

 

 

Their visitors, equally non-aristocratic but terribly earnest, amuse us by their attempts to use their very best weekend-at-the-country-house manners. Richard the diplomatist (Johnny Stewart) is of course more polished than young boxer Sandy ("I've been looking forward to this most awfully"), but each quickly becomes a toy for Judith and her Mata Hari wiles. Tyler Jones as the cheerfully callow Simon Bliss flirts shamelessly with social climber Myra (Julie Wright), who becomes indignant at his mockery.

 

 

 

Martina Ohlhauser as Sorel picks up the bewildered young boxer for an extended make-out session in the library. Marsha Sray as the painfully shy book lover Jackie is quite, quite overwhelmed by all this flamboyance. 

All those Blisses are playing games. They have a fine time trying to enlist their visitors in a post-dinner parlor game similar to charades, but their real joy is that of making theatre in real life. They all know the lines of Judith's most successful play, a real groaner of a melodrama, and they'll fling themselves into it at the drop of a syllable. They magnify all of their emotions to melodramatic pitch, no matter the subject of conversation, without a worry about the feelings of anyone at all. The second act builds to the triumphant climax of Simon's announcement of his engagement -- quite astounding the presumed object of his affections. 

 

Act Three begins with the antidotal silence of the unoccupied breakfast table and some extended, amusing mime and small business as the intimidated guests appear, one after another. To stay or not to stay? And if to leave, then how and what to say? They confer, form an alliance and scurry upstairs just as the Blisses dawn on the scene like another slowly gathering whirlwind. Eric Porter as novelist David Bliss agrees to an extempore reading of the opening of his newly finished novel The Sinful Woman, which is, to judge from the oft-interrupted text, just as much a pot-boiler as Judith's play.  And we're off again with family bickering, unhelpful suggestions, repartee, reproach, expostulation, and self-dramatizing. Another madcap day in the country gets under way.

The Times of London in its 1973 obituary for Sir Noël called Hay Fever "a dazzling achievement; like The Importance of Being Earnest, it is pure comedy with no mission but to delight, and it depends purely on the interplay of characters, not on elaborate comic machinery." 

With Karen Sneed's direction and Bernadette Nason's dialect coaching, North by Northwest Theatre Company gets this dizzy mechanism just right, spinning the Blisses off one another and all around their bewildered guests. 

This is a fun evening, especially with the satisfaction of watching the wicked delight of Austin's leading expatriate English actress as she sends up both her own profession and the exquisite manners of the English drawing room.

And as for the hay fever -- it's purely emblematic. No one is sneezing or suffering. . . but all four visitors seem to have developed a definite allergy to country life in Cookham!

 

 

 

EXTRAS:

Statesman of Sunday, May 24 publishes short e-mail interview of Bernadette Nason done by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin (.pdf)

Review by Barry Pineo for the Austin Chronicle, May 28 

Program for Hay Fever

 

Hits as of 2015 03 01: 1634