Modern British Drama 1890-1990, many commentators have considered ‘‘Coward’s public image—the appearance of upper class elegance, inscrutable poise, cocktail party wit elevated to epigram—to be the most brilliant of his artistic creations. Like Oscar Wilde Coward is judged to have put his genius into his life’’ as well as to have ‘‘notoriously put his personality into his plays— writing major roles for himself to act—and the characters he played were a pose that disguised the reality of his life.’’

In the early-twentieth century, with the increasing variety and availability of all kinds of communication media, performance was no longer restricted to the stage. Whether in a radio interview, a fan magazine photo, or a newspaper gossip column, celebrity images were widely distributed. The public had a sense of what a given star was like; they expected the star—in person or in performance—to live up to that image. In Hay Fever, Judith acknowledges this dynamic. As she says, ‘‘it isn’t me really, it’s my Celebrated Actress glamor’’ that her young infatuated visitor loves, but this does not trouble her a bit. To her, theatrical glamor is as good as the real thing. It is of no matter if she is not truly beautiful because, as she tells her children, ‘‘I made thousands think I was.’’ If a good act earns the same rewards as the genuine article, what is the difference? The public is ready to accept false images, so long as they are pleasing. Celebrity itself has an attraction that for some reason goes beyond talent or substance.

Although Judith admits the plays that made her famous were often terrible, and David states plainly that he writes ‘‘bad novels,’’ each still garners wealth and admiration. Sandy has fallen in love with Judith’s on-stage persona; and Myra has been longing to meet David because she likes his books. Coward underscores that the Blisses are not true artists, but merely spoiled and egoistic celebrities. The play emphasizes how misguided their young admirers are to be fooled by unsubstantial public images.

Coward takes pains to show that the Blisses are not creative individuals who deserve to have their eccentricities indulged for the sake of their great art. He stresses that they produce nothing of value, are utterly self-absorbed, and possess no personal philosophy beyond enjoying themselves. Unlike the admirable individualists of the American literary tradition who cause no harm and serve as potential role models for others, the Blisses do cause harm and could care less. They exploit their privilege to amuse themselves and torment others, avoiding responsibility through affecting absent-mindedness and blindness.

Judith claims that ‘‘if dabbling gives me pleasure, I don’t see why I shouldn’t dabble.’’ But the play reveals that others might be able to offer her many reasons why she should not dabble with people’s lives. Judith may say that the arrival of a houseful of unexpected guests was inevitable since ‘‘everything that happens is fate,’’ but the housekeeper Clara—who suffers the consequences of all the extra work—correctly adds that it is ‘‘more like arrant selfishness.’’ Just like the unrepentant characters who sing the song ‘‘Regency Rakes’’ in Coward’s 1934 play Conversation Piece, the Blisses could say of themselves, ‘‘each of us takes/A personal pride/In the thickness of hide/That prevents us from seeing/How vulgar we’re being.’’

Sorel’s attempts at self-reform throw into stark relief the absolute blindness—or thickness of hide— of the rest of the family. She knows she is ‘‘entirely lacking in restraint,’’ thanks to being raised by parents who have ‘‘spent their lives cultivating their arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and things,’’ but her efforts at improvement are only partly successful.

Although Sorel, in her desire to change, is charmed by her guest Richard’s proper and conventional manners, neither he nor the other visitors are held up as a particularly appealing alternative to the Blisses. While the hosts bring spectacle and drama into ordinary life, the visitors engage in the everyday theater of ‘‘good manners,’’ hiding their true feelings and motives behind polite behavior. Each has accepted the weekend invitation with some kind of personal agenda, hoping to meet a celebrity or consummate a romance (or both). Sandy tells Judith, ‘‘I’ve been planning to know you for ages.’’ Myra confesses she accepted Simon’s invitation only to meet David. Such plans and schemes are comically thwarted by the Blisses’ inconvenient spontaneity.

Coward contrasts the Blisses’ lack of selfawareness with the outsiders’ self-consciousness: Richard’s careful propriety, Jackie’s painful shyness, Sandy’s awkward nervousness, Myra’s worldly calculation. The visitors’ false presentation of self is paired with their false perception of their hosts. Richard expresses the romanticized view that seems to have attracted them all to the house; he thinks the Blisses are ‘‘a very Bohemian family,’’ ‘‘so alive and vital and different than other people.’’ But perhaps the visitors are not so very different from their hosts after all. Complimenting Richard, Sorel unwittingly makes clear that his ways are no more transparently understandable than her mother’s over-the-top theatricality. She tells him, ‘‘You always do the right thing, and no one knows a bit what you’re really thinking.’’ Later Judith comments on what she views as his excessive restraint, saying ‘‘do stop being noncommittal.’’ Coward makes being habitually noncommittal seem as false as offering phony expressions of commitment. By the end of the play, the audience might acknowledge that Myra’s angry description of her hosts could just as well apply to them all: ‘‘You’re the most infuriating set of hypocrites I’ve ever seen. This house is a complete featherbed of false emotions— you’re posing, self-centered egotists.’’

Yet the very self-centered, egocentric behavior that torments the on-stage guests, entertains the onlooking audience. Although outrageous and unpredictable acts cause problems in daily life, they remains the stuff of good theater. So although Hay Fever reflects what could be a frightening concept— the total absence of meaning in modern life— the play remains in comedic territory because its substanceless spectacle is safely contained in the sphere or performance. The audience gets a pleasurably voyeuristic glimpse of the leisure-class, while also getting to feel comfortably superior when noticing the foibles the characters do not recognize in themselves.

Although the viewers, too, might engage in daily deceptions and worship substanceless celebrities, the extreme scenarios on stage seem removed from their lives, keeping the parody from hitting too close to home. If, as Coward wrote in his lyrics to the 1923 song ‘‘London Calling,’’ ‘‘Life is nothing but a game of make-believe,’’ then the world would be as pointless and chaotic as the Bliss household. But having perfected the art of maintaining comic distance, the playwright is able to offer gentle critique in an entertaining, rather than alarming, package.

Coward himself—despite repeatedly stating he had no intention for his plays to do anything more than make people laugh—at times admitted that his work did address more substantial themes. In 1925 he wrote that he wanted his plays to deal with ‘‘the hard facts of existence,’’ to ‘‘concentrate on psychological impulses’’ and to ‘‘enlighten.’’ Later, in a 1956 diary entry, he noted ‘‘I am a better writer than I am given credit for being. It is fairly natural that my writing should be casually appreciated because my personality, performances, music, and legend get in the way. Some day . . . my works may be adequately assessed.’’

Today, when we place a play such as Hay Fever in historical context, it is possible to acknowledge not only Coward’s skills in constructing situational comedy but also his clever response to the literary and philosophical debates of his era.

Source: Erika M. Kreger, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999. Kreger is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, and has served as a guest lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

The Bliss family has invited four intimate friends down to their place in Cookham, meaning to seduce their guests. However the Blisses end up abandoning them. The Blisses live in their own world, a realm which has precious little to do with external reality and the visitors to it are so completely bewildered that they end up seriously pondering whether they actually will be served tea at ‘‘teatime’’. Driven to starvation by their hosts’ indifference and to distraction by their antics the guests unceremoniously depart. ‘‘How very rude!’’ exclaims Mrs. Bliss on hearing that they have done so.

Nothing is supposed to happen over a weekend and in this play Coward takes this social dictum to absurdly comic levels. A retired actress, Judith Bliss, will have absolutely nothing to do with the care and feeding of her guests, the only things that seem to interest her are a word game of her own creation called ‘‘Adverbs’’ and the replaying of scenes from her old stage vehicles over and over again. Coward’s choice of a word game whose rules are incommunicable artfully telegraphs the point of his play: one cannot learn the rules of life; one must simply have them. The Bliss menage creates its own milieu through a family code whose idiom is basically theatrical. Even though her children appear to loathe their mother’s self-indulgent theatrics, they effortlessly feed her her ‘‘lines’’, practically on cue.

In its way the comedy is a sort of social reportage. Coward has identified the source of Hay Fever as being the evenings he spent at the Riverside Drive apartment of the actress Laurette Taylor in New York City, during which Miss Taylor subjected her guests to frenzied parlor games.

Thus on one level, Hay Fever presents us with an ancient and even severe situation: the observance of the laws of hospitality. Granted that in the beaumonde context of the play the laws of hospitality have degenerated into mere social graces, but rarely has the gracious living of high society been shown to be as graceless as it is in Hay Fever. For what we see and hear in this play is the merest lip service courtesy, indeed the laws of hospitality are flagrantly flouted, decorum is ignored, etiquette non-existent. No one is adequately or even inadequately introduced; no provisions are made for the feeding of guests; people wander in and out indiscriminately; conversations are interrupted and there is hardly a trace of civility. The Blisses do not even go through the motions of wanting to be polite; they are so staggeringly self-obsessed as to be completely incapable of legitimate social exchange. They treat everyone else as supernumeraries in the theatrical extravaganza of their lives.

One of Coward’s cleverer devices is the bedroom controversy that develops among the Bliss family when each member finally realizes that the other has invited someone down for the weekend. Something called ‘‘The Japanese Room’’ is the coveted sleeping chamber and each member of the family desires it for his or her own particular guest. Each tries to palm off a place called ‘‘Little Hell’’ on the other’s chosen companion. We become privy to this information during a dialogue between Sorel Bliss and her brother Simon—with their mother presiding—which elegantly limns the barbarous nature of their way of life. Coward sets up the discussion as a sort of apologia for indecency. We learn that the Blisses are quite proud of their ways and believe themselves to be a breed apart.

It is this ‘‘otherness’’ that reflects Coward’s own feelings about the way of the world in the early 20th century. John Lahr has said that Coward’s comedies focus on a ‘‘talentocracy’’ whose selfawareness stems from its feeling of difference from, and indifference to, the traditional aristocracy’s modes. In Hay Fever Coward shows how this selfconscious differentiation becomes self-propelling. As Sorel says of her parents, they have: ‘‘spent their lives cultivating their arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and things’’— note that ‘‘arts’’ is modified with a possessive.

The playwright himself was the first person to admit that Hay Fever is awfully short on plot development or even action. In his introduction to Hay Fever (Play Parade, 1) Coward goes so far as to call it ‘‘one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have encountered’’. He goes on to posit that the work is wholly dependent upon ‘‘the expert technique’’ of its performers. If the dialogue is delivered with any archness—for example should the actress playing Myra Aryundel indicate in the slightest that she knows beforehand that her ‘‘haddock is disgusting’’—the play will become insufferable. The characters must never revel in their ‘‘upper-class ellipticalness’’ (to use Robert Kiernan’s phrase). They must simply take it for granted.

Coward’s tenets for comic playwriting are most cogently illustrated by Hay Fever. It does not achieve its effects via epigrammatic flourishes, but rather by simple phrases being delivered in very complicated situations. Taken out of context the ‘‘laugh lines’’ are vacuous, but within the dramatic situation of the play they are hilarious.

In 1964 the National Theatre chose this play to be the first work that it presented by a living English dramatist. Coward directed the revival himself and its success started a tremendous renewal of interest in his works.

Source: Thomas F. Connolly, ‘‘ Hay Fever ’’ in The International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 1: Plays, edited by Mark Hawkins-Dady, St. James Press, 1992, pp. 318–19.

Noël Coward’s ‘‘Hay Fever ’’ has found a perfect home for itself at that exquisite toy of a theatre the Music Box (designed in 1921 for Irving Berlin and his partner, Sam H. Harris, by the celebrated theatre architect C. Howard Crane). Moreover, in Michael H. Yeargan the play has found the perfect designer for the setting that Coward called for—a country house in Berkshire, not far from London and with a view, in fair weather, of the pleasing green valley of the Thames. Mr. Yeargan has provided an interior straight out of Voysey, with leaded-glass French doors opening onto a garden, an arts-and-crafts oak staircase, plenty of chintz-covered overstuffed furniture, and a pantry door that is constantly swinging open and shut at the prompting of perky Clara, a much put-upon maid-of-all-work (played with appropriately vulgar brio by Barbara Bryne). The felicity with which the architecture onstage marries the architecture of the theatre itself is a symbol of the felicity of the occasion as a whole; this is an ideal production of ‘‘Hay Fever,’’ and I wish it the longest possible run.

Coward wrote ‘‘Hay Fever’’ in 1924, when he was not yet twenty-five (the next year, he would have five shows running simultaneously in London, including ‘‘Hay Fever’’). His inspiration for the comedy sprang, so he reported years later, from weekends he had spent at the summer place on Long Island of the playwright Hartley Manners and his wife, the actress Laurette Taylor. The Mannerses’ hospitality was notably errant and intermittent, though well intended, and Coward in the charming, selfdelighting, and mischievously flirtatious Judith Bliss sketches a benignly exaggerated portrait of Miss Taylor. To play an outrageous person who is also an actress is for any actress a delectable opportunity, and Rosemary Harris as Judith Bliss makes the most of it. In the course of a sensationally amusing performance, there is scarcely a theatrical trick she doesn’t stoop to, but then Judith Bliss/Laurette Taylor was evidently someone who stopped at nothing in the way of stoops. Enslaved by her wiles are Judith’s self-important husband (Roy Dotrice), her burgeoning daughter (Mia Dillon), and her rather giddy son (Robert Joy).

The structure of the play consists, as so often in Coward, of a social symmetry placed in jeopardy and then more or less successfully patted back into temporary balance, if not restored. Unbeknownst to the others, each of the Blisses has invited a guest from London for the weekend: an innocent young man (Campbell Scott) who has fallen in love with Mrs. Bliss, or thinks he has; a somewhat older man, a diplomat (Charles Kimbrough), who is perhaps ready to fall in love with the daughter; a fey flapper (Deborah Rush) whom the father has summoned to his side and then forgotten; and a slinky woman of the world (Carolyn Seymour) with whom the son is infatuated. The guests are understandably dismayed by the reception they are subjected to; little by little, they begin to establish new relationships with their assorted hosts and one another. The play ends with the Bliss family locked in combat at the breakfast table while the guests make good their escape. That is the scanty sum of Hay Fever, and yet it suffices; Coward’s high spirits (and evident delight in his talent) turn what appears at first to be a mere sparkling and sputtering pin-wheel into a quite substantial work of art. The witty period costumes are by Jennifer yon Mayrhauser, the lighting is by Arden Fingerhut, and the superlative direction is by Brian Murray.

Source: Brendan Gill, ‘‘Country Pleasures’’ in the New Yorker, Vol. LXI, no. 44, December 23, 1985, p. 44.

It was Shaw, I believe, who said that America and England were two countries separated by the same language. I thought of the remark at the performance of Noel Coward’s 1925 play Hay Fever at the Helen Hayes Theatre. I am not a theatrical chauvinist, but it has struck me on several occasions that certain English plays had best be left to the English. Coward’s plays are among them. The trouble with the present revival of Hay Fever is not confined to its lack of English actors, but that is part of it. The proper way to speak Coward’s lines is to appear unaware of and superior to them, to pretend that they have not been spoken at all.

The American, no matter how hard he tries to be casual or inexpressive in speaking Coward’s witticisms, can’t help seeming to mean them. And they shouldn’t be meant: they should, ever so lightly, be ‘‘assumed.’’ An American who tries to take on the Coward guise becomes false and hoity-toity. But Coward’s artifice is a reality, a habit of mind and spirit so fixed that it becomes not second but very nearly ‘‘first’’ nature.

If any Americans are able to approximate the manner successfully, none of them is in the cast of Hay Fever. Shirley Booth is a natural comedian and often a touching character actress, but she is not a poseuse, an actressy actress. Her forte is the middle middle class, and she is out of her element in this play. Worse still, everyone and everything else— including the set and clothes—are misplaced. Carole Shelley, who is English and capable of authentic cockney speech, replaces her person by a characterization which seems to precede her entrance on the stage.

Still, the play retains some of its inherent attributes and arouses occasional laughter. I was shocked some years ago to read in Ronald Bryden’s column of theatre criticism in the London Observer that he thought Coward England’s finest living playwright. In a sense it is so: if the term means to indicate the deftest of stage craftsmen with a marked persona typical of certain aspects of English society and something of a mocking commentary on it. Coward’s trick is to mask his own approval and enjoyment of what he is doing in an attitude of indifference. One is never sure how much of this is calculated and how much the real thing.

Source: Harold Clurman, review of Hay Fever in the Nation, Vol. 211, no. 18, November 30, 1970, p. 572.