Noel Coward’s weightless 1925 comedy of bad manners here makes a handsome, old-fashioned star vehicle for two great character actors and scene-stealers, Christine Baranski and Richard E. Grant. They’re retired stage icon Judith Bliss and her novelist husband David, egomaniacs blind to social convention, who with their two similarly-wired adult children confuse and confound four enamoured guests at their Cookham country house.
The mechanics of this vintage piece weren’t entirely smooth on opening night, but the intended audience here is surely after surefire laughs and glamour rather than perfect line-readings or radical reappraisal. That, this Hay Fever surely delivers, and it will doubtless tune up once it’s run in for a bit.
