Kendal shows why Coward’s comedy is still utter Bliss
Duke of York's
THERE ARE not many — if any — comedies as fresh as Hay Fever that have been around since 1925, which is when Noel Coward wrote it in just three days. On the face of it, the play’s main ingredient — people having affairs in a country house — should be enough to scream hoary old war horse at any one considering a revival. In fact, so familiar are they, the deliberately clichéd play within Michael Frayn’s brilliant farce, Noises Off, is about that — infidelity in a country house.
Here, the house belongs to a family of posh, self-centred bohemians who treat their guests with a disgraceful lack of consideration. However, what elevates this comedy above the rest is that Coward’s witty script doesn’t rely on affairs being hidden from view to generate laughs, but on being publicly confessed.
Take the moment when Felicity Kendal’s flamboyant Judith Bliss is pecked on the neck by impeccably behaved diplomat Richard Greatham (Michael Simkins). Instead of keeping the indiscretion quiet as any sane person would, Bliss immediately declares that her husband David (Simon Shepherd) must be told even though it will probably destroy him and certainly his career as a novelist.
“Tell him what?,” asks the dumbfounded Greatham. And so it goes, with each member of the Bliss family, including their grown-up children Sorel and Simon, responsible for making Greatham’s life very uncomfortable for 24 hours.
He is one of four appallingly treated guests who have been invited down to the house by a member of the Bliss family for what today might be called a dirty weekend, but in Coward’s world of beautifully dressed, well spoken and relentlessly articulate sophisticates — even the idiot boxer here is from a public school and speaks in grammatically perfect sentences — feels something altogether less seedy.
Lindsay Posner directs with pace and subtle panache and does the play and everyone watching and acting in it the favour of paring the evening down to a breezy two hours. It also helps that Kendal is in the finest possible form.
The actress — now herself of a certain age — beautifully captures the attention-seeking techniques of an ageing professional performer who compensates for her loss of allure by turning every possible moment into a drama in which she takes the central role.
As Coward’s retired actress who yearns to return to the London stage she is, in more ways than one, domestic Bliss.