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Hay Fever |
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I was lucky to secure a ticket to press night for "Hayfever," 20 April
2006. The play still holds up (it was first performed in 1925) and was
very funny. Some things about human nature never change. Judi is very
funny but not too over the top not to be believed. She got a loud round of
applause doing her bit in a word game to illustrate the word "winsome."
She plays an actress, and as she mentioned the newspaper critics she
pointed out into the audience as she referred to the critic from the Daily
Mail and then to another part of the audience when she mentioned two
others. I don't know if she does this every time or improvised since the
actual critics were probably there. She looked lovely in her two
ensembles, which sort of flowed over her body like her 2006 Oscar dress.
Her red wig looked real and is very flattering I think. Since I had not
seen or read the play previously, I somehow expected her character to be
more hateful than she is. Perhaps part of that is Judi's interpretation,
or perhaps it is because she is written and played as a real person and
not as a caricature.
More Reviews can be found at the following websites:
Hay Fever A Bill Kenwright and Thelma Holt presentation of a play in two acts by Noel Coward. Directed by Peter Hall. Judith Bliss - Judi Dench Variety -- By DAVID BENEDICT -- April 24, 2006 Dan Stevens, Judi Dench, Kim Medcalf and Peter Bowles take a weekend in the country in Noel Coward's 'Hay Fever,' directed by Peter Hall. People assume that to play Noel Coward's comedies you need good deportment, better breeding and perfect manners. Those certainly help, but the essential quality an actor requires is breath control. Coward's language makes almost Shakespearean demands of thesps, who must be able to play the rhythm of long, perfectly crafted lines in which not one syllable is misplaced. It's no wonder that veteran Shakespearean Judi Dench delivers a master-class performance as the aptly named Judith Bliss in Peter Hall's revival of "Hay Fever," Coward's 1925 comedy of deliciously bad manners. She turns sentences into comedy time bombs. Although the play glitters with lines that are gifts for a comedian of her caliber, it's what Dench does with a pause that distinguishes her art. Affronted by the temerity of her daughter Sorel's suggestion that her actress mother shouldn't "go flaunting about with young men," Dench' Judith knocks her back with a whiplash retort. "I've been morally an extremely nice woman all my life," she snorts, holding up the line to allow its full preposterousness to raise a big laugh. Her eyes dart and she drops in the airy, killer finish: "More or less." Dench excels at revealing layers of humanity and puncturing pomposity. Even her Oscar-winning turn as Elizabeth I in "Shakespeare in Love""Shakespeare In Love" was all about the comedic contrast between the surface grandeur of a monarch and the wicked gleam of her plain-dealing woman beneath. And when it comes to layers, Judith has plenty. One minute she's grand lady of the manor, all Napoleonic gardening hat and galoshes; the next, the ego has landed. She revels in being the happily and gloriously narcissistic star, then she's off playing the adoring mother of her two impossibly arch children who, one line later, irritate her beyond endurance. The action of the play is set amid a weekend in the country, where all four family members -- Judith, husband David (Peter Bowles), daughter Sorel (Kim Medcalf) and son Simon (Dan Stevens) -- have coincidentally invited their own latest love interests to stay. Over what becomes the house party from hell, it's hard to know whom Dench toys with and seduces the most. Is it sporty and infatuated young Sandy Tyrell (suitably handsome Charles Edwards)? Or her daughter's current infatuation, stuffed-shirt diplomat Richard Greatham (solid William Chubb)? Ultimately, she reduces the audience to gales of laughter as she actually skips oh-so-artlessly to the piano to illustrate her insouciant charm. Unfortunately, little else in the production is on the same level, with the fault lying squarely at the feet of director Hall. He makes a rod for his own back by casting Dench. She guarantees box office, but she's 71 and has to refer to her daughter as a "vigorous ingenue of 19." Worse, Dench looks younger offstage than onstage thanks to an unflattering red wig and the aging, pale tones of Simon Higlett's otherwise sophisticated '20s costumes. Hall ages other characters up to ease the difference. Thus Simon's latest love, Myra (a slightly strangulated Belinda Lang), now oddly becomes a middle-aged woman. When Judith refers to her as a man-eating vampire, it should be amusingly absurd; here it seems rather accurate. Aside from Stevens as an amusingly bumptious Simon and a seriously aloof Bowles as his father, the perfs are off-key and fail to mesh. Medcalf's Sorel barks and slogs away at her lines like Eliza Doolittle failing to convince as a lady. Lean and smart, Edwards is wholly miscast as a sweet, dumb boxer. His best moment comes in the silent morning-after-the-night-before routine as he recoils in horror at the sight of something unspeakable beneath a silver breakfast dish. That reliance on gags off the text is epitomized by the scene in which housekeeper Clara lays the table. Humming away to herself, she slips into singing the whole of "Tea for Two." "Nobody near us/to see or to hear us/No friends or relations/on weekend vacations," sings Lin Blakley, relishing her moment, her strong voice winning a round of applause. Yet interpolating that song -- not one of Coward's, it's from "No No Nanette," which opened the same year as "Hay Fever" -- is a sign of defeat. A play as good as this shouldn't need that kind of assist. Dench is unfortunately caught up in an effortful production of fits and starts that fails to deliver the play's easeful, sustained comic brilliance. Sets and costumes, Simon Higlett; lighting, Paul Pyant; sound, Gregory Clarke; production stage manager, Maggie Mackay. Opened, reviewed April 20, 2006. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.
Hay Fever, Haymarket Theatre Royal, London By Alastair Macaulay -- April 24 2006 -- Financial Times To see the Haymarket Theatre Royal production of Hay Fever, you can pay up to £60 (£20 for the gallery), or £100 for an Oscar Wilde VIP seat with special bar, sandwiches and programme. Is it worth it? I would think anyone paying these prices would like to see Judi Dench enter a room with an armful of garden flowers that looked newly cut and not plastic, and would like to hear the Bliss family argue knowledgeably about a well-known street in central Paris that is the rue Boissy d’Anglas, not (as here) “d’Anglais”. Are we really to believe that this has been directed by Peter Hall? Peter Bowles acts as if his mind was on the stock market. Charles Edwards plays the butch dim hetero Sandy Tyrrell with flaring eyes, clamping his splayed fingers repeatedly to breastbone. As Myra Arundel, a guest who constantly complains that the host Bliss family act insincerely, Belinda Lang makes the idiotic decision to behave more artificially than they, throwing theatrically angular poses and drawling the North Sea dry as she kills such lines as “I think Strayynge is putting it Mildleh”: Myra as camp bitch. Fortunately, this is Hay Fever, Coward’s best-built comedy. I won’t use the word “fortunately” of Judi Dench, because she leaves so little to chance. In a play that I know perhaps too well, she alone makes every line sound fresh, surprising. She alone avoids the clipped, classy clichés of standard Coward style. She has often played actresses, but here she goes yet further. Judith Bliss is forever making effects, striking poses, turning accidental situations into stage performances. But Dench here plays dazzlingly acting games. Often switching out of nowhere into a stunningly focused “sincerity”, as with the suddenly Chekhovian intensity she brings to “June has always been an unlucky month for me”, she displays the art that conceals art. When she wants one of Simon’s disgusting cigarettes, the impulse begins by digging her foot in her son’s ribs and ends with throwing her head back to blow the smoke upwards. Just the way she walks to the piano becomes an enchanting little drama. We are lucky to see her illumine an irresistible play – but she is not lucky that Peter Hall is making her work so hard to enliven an otherwise stale production.
Dench Is Bliss in `Hay Fever': Matt Wolf April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Judi Dench gives a star performance as the preening actress, Judith Bliss, in Noel Coward's ``Hay Fever.'' Not the least of her accomplishments is to reveal that the play's celebrated monstre sacre does indeed have a heart. That's not always so evident in Coward's enduring 1925 comedy of bad manners, which played ``get the guest'' decades before Edward Albee invoked that very phrase in ``Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' Traditionally, the play lands as a three- act lark of sustained incivility whereby the Bliss family do everything possible to send packing the guests descended for the weekend on their Cookham home. But trust the supremely gifted Dench to subtly alter the comedic landscape of this latest revival at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Playing a self-absorbed actress for whom life would seem to be one long curtain call, this least actressy of performers hints at the chinks in the armor that are covered up by Judith's relentless flamboyance. ``David's been a good husband to me,'' she tells one of the raft of visitors, with reference to her novelist spouse, ``but he's wearing a bit thin.'' The line gets a laugh, as expected, while simultaneously suggesting that the Bliss family routine has begun to pall. Elsewhere, remarking ``I am beautiful and sad,'' Dench catches the price paid for living every moment at such full tilt. Gumboot Drill There can rarely have been so animated a Judith. From her entrance in a batty floral dress onward, Dench doesn't move about the stage when she can careen across it, as if life were best approached pell-mell, with scant time for reflection. There's a great moment when she flops down on the sofa only to have son Simon remove her gumboots as if part of some unspoken drill. That's why Dame Judi allows the vaguest glimpse of pathos at those moments when Judith does stop to survey the scene, as might be expected from someone who, we're told, has been ``battling with life a long time.'' Don't be alarmed, however. As directed by Sir Peter Hall, this ``Hay Fever'' is no deconstruction of the play. (Some of us are still reeling from a recent West End version, directed by Declan Donnellan, that was so busy ``exposing'' Coward's encoded meanings that it contained scarcely a single chuckle.) Comic Timing Not for nothing is Dench fondly remembered for her National Theatre Lady Bracknell nearly 25 years ago in Oscar Wilde's ``The Importance of Being Earnest,'' also directed by Hall. A peerless tragedienne, the actress also boasts second-to-none comic timing. Indeed, she lends a Wildean spin to Judith's observation near the start that ``it's so bad for your skin to leave things about on it.'' And she caps the play brilliantly with the simple remark, ``how very rude,'' deliciously unaware that the actual rudeness belongs to a clan who think, to their cost, that they're cleverer and more sizzling than the rest of us mere mortals. If Judith is growing old -- and Dench brilliantly captures the character's awareness of her advancing years -- she is going to do so in high, self-absorbed style, preferably with one or another admirer staring worshipfully at her. Supporting Cast Hall's production would be improved if that retinue were always equal to the task. But among the supporting cast, co-star Peter Bowles virtually alone catches the rhythms of a play that can't in any way look as if it is being italicized or commented upon. Playing the smiling-faced boxer, Sandy, who is the first of the guests to arrive, a smirking Charles Edwards misses out on the character's amiable butchness and pulls faces instead. And as the guest, who, Judith warns us in an immortal comment, uses sex ``as a sort of shrimping net,'' Belinda Lang's Myra is less vamp than vampire; the performance is borderline grotesque. Playing the two Bliss children, Dan Stevens and Kim Medcalf could up the charm quotient, no matter how ``beastly,'' in daughter Sorel's assessment, this family really is. Or maybe it's that no one can match Dench's mixture of charm and cunning, her gift for exaggeration combined with very real honesty. That's precisely what separates her Judith Bliss from the pack -- for all her florid theatrics, the performance is absolutely true.
Hay Fever -- Theatre Royal, Haymarket Michael Billington -- Friday April 21, 2006 -- The Guardian Put Dame Judi Dench into Noel Coward's 20s comedy directed by Peter Hall at the Haymarket and you have a gilt-edged hit before you have even opened. But although it makes a good night out and Dench is superb, the production doesn't yet convey the transcendent joy of Coward's own legendary revival from the early days of Olivier's National Theatre. It is really an evening for Dench-watchers; and what is fascinating is how she triumphs in a role that goes against the grain of her natural talent. Coward's Judith Bliss is a fading West End star encased in hyper-theatrical egotism. She is also the bustling centre of a Bohemian family that treats the four guests invited down for a weekend in Cookham with a disdain bordering on rudeness. But Dench is the very antithesis of Judith. Her forte is an emotional directness that pierces the heart, while Coward's character is a sacred monster swathed in grease-paint falsity. Like the great actor she is, however, Dench turns this to her advantage. She shows Coward's Judith affecting the role of a rural hostess and getting it subtly wrong. We first see her in a rakish, Napoleonic garden hat that clashes with her clumping gumboots. Trying to entice the flannelled fool she has invited for the weekend, she spreadeagles herself over the sofa announcing: "I've just been pruning the calceolarias." It is the gulf between the over-studied lines and the inappropriate theatrical gesture that makes this a sublime moment. Dench may not be the kind of actory actor Coward envisaged. But that makes it all the funnier when she and the family launch into scenes from an old mothballed melodrama, Love's Whirlwind; or when she leaps up, having been pecked on the neck by an ardent diplomat, crying, "What are we to do?" She never lets you forget that Judith's real home is the dressing room and that her theatrical instinct is at war with her social role. But Coward's play depends on a clear division between the outrageous family and the insulted guests, which is somewhat blurred in Hall's production. Neither Dan Stevens nor Kim Medcalf quite suggest the untamed wildness of the Bliss children. Olivia Darnley as the gauche flapper invited by Bliss père looks confusingly like his own daughter. And while Belinda Lang as the seducer Myra Arundel has the sinuous outline of an Erte drawing, she lacks the voracity of a woman who, in Judith's line, uses "sex as a sort of shrimping-net". Aside from Dench, Peter Bowles as Judith's novelist husband best catches the acidulous tone of Coward's comedy of bad manners. Bowles looks like a cat who has swallowed several dishes of cream and exudes the vanity of a man who knows he's a second-rater and can get away with it. Even if Coward's misogyny emerges in a scene where the novelist toys with Myra, Bowles hits just the right note of armour-plated insouciance. The astonishing thing is that Coward's comedy still holds up so well. And, if one looks for a reason, it is not simply the flawless structure or the crisply precise dialogue. It is because Coward harpoons exactly the pretensions of the new 20s talentocracy in trying to ape the country-house style of the upper middle classes. And it is their failure to do so, and their instinctive lapse into a privileged professionalism, that both explains Hay Fever's longevity and illumines Dench's brilliance.
First Night: Hay Fever, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London
Dame Judi shows 'Hay Fever' is not to be
sneezed at, By Paul Taylor -- 21 April 2006 -- Independent Online Review From the banks of the Nile in Antony and Cleopatra (which opened on Wednesday at Stratford) to the Thames-side Cookham residence of the Bliss family in Hay Fever (which opened last night at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket) might feel like quite a leap. But watching these plays on successive evenings, as I've just done, brings home how Shakespeare's love birds and Noel Coward's bohemians share a compulsive tendency to self-dramatisation and a marked difficulty in understanding the concept of "off-stage". The difference is that, though they crave an audience, the Shakespearean couple are safely wrapped up in one another, whereas the alarming Blisses need innocent outsiders to act as participatory stooges in their private games. Cleopatra is one of the many characters Judi Dench has portrayed for Peter Hall. Now, in his highly entertaining revival of the Coward classic, she plays Judith Bliss, the retired actress who presides over a weekend from hell in which four non-bohemian guests are first ignored, then ritually humiliated, and finally steal away on tiptoe the next morning rather than endure another second with their monstrously egotistical hosts. Performed on Simon Higlett's handsome set that presents the Bliss home as an opulent arts-and-craft retreat, the production is deliciously knowing about the shameless wiles of theatricality and the havoc that it wreaks. True, at last night's premiere, it wasn't just the social awkwardness of the dramatised situation that made the first act feel a bit tight and strained but the show succeeded in warming up considerably as it progressed. Looking, at moments, disconcertingly like the late Queen Mother in her floaty, floral garments, Dench's Judith veers hilariously between striking attitudes and spouting prefabricated sentiments that derive from memories of her back-catalogue of dreadful melodramas and sudden rapid, pettish concessions to reality. It's the seamless, brilliantly timed way in which she slides from the semi-rehearsed to the grudgingly spontaneous that makes her performance so funny. There are some delectable don't-you-dare-stop-me moments when she overrides protests and I shall never forget her little oh-so-stoical scamper to the piano to play what is evidently her one, oh-so-poignant party piece for the stuffed shirt of a diplomat (William Chubb) who only has to touch her to become embroiled in her improvised, wholly bogus scene of staunch parting with her self-centred novelist husband (Peter Bowles). Both brigades (the conventional visitors and the arty home team) acquit themselves with honours. I particularly liked Charles Edwards as Sandy Tyrell, the sporty, chinless chump who here is an amusingly bashful tangle of hero-worship for Judith before becoming a jumpy, nerve-racked desperado for escape. Dan Stevens and Kim Medcalf (as Simon and Sorel) expertly signal that, however much the Bliss offspring may want to rebel, they are programmed to use newcomers as props and to close ranks against them. Indeed, the morning after the ghastly night before, the worryingly reinvigorated family has trouble remembering the identity of the depleted bit-players. The climactic laugh comes when Dench, hearing the slammed door and the noise of the absconding car, surfaces for a second from the Blisses' breakfast row and, sublimely impervious to the irony of it, snaps "How very rude!". A Hay Fever that is not to be sneezed at.
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