Sunday 17 August 2014

Stratford Festival 2014 # 3: Recovered From The Fever

It's time for the major Stratford binge of the year:  five plays in just over a week!  That's a lot of theatre all at one go, to be sure, but at Stratford it's always worth while.

Sorry to have to say, though, the Noel Coward's Hay Fever is one of the more disappointing shows I have seen at Stratford in recent years.  But let me hasten to add: this is not the fault either of the actors or the production.  I'm laying the blame squarely on Coward's script.  Hay Fever, for my money, is basically a pseudo-comedic glorification of bullying.  The four central characters, the Bliss family, start out nasty and stay nasty throughout.  Their life appears to be anything but blissful.  They snipe at each other, and at their four hapless house guests.  The comic lines are more often put-downs and slam-downs than any other Coward play I have seen.  It takes a while for the material to even start to become funny, and then it very quickly becomes unfunny again.  Worst of all, and a serious sin for a playwright to commit (in my humble opinion) is that the script forces Judith Bliss (the mother) to start over-acting the moment she hits the stage, and keep increasing the quotient of over-acting far past the point of over-kill.  I don't think I was alone in finding this unfunny, as the well-filled house at my performance were also pretty silent for long stretches of what is supposedly a masterly comedy.

Having said all of that, the actors -- one and all -- deserve every credit for the efforts they put into making this creaky piece work on stage.  There was an abundance of well-staged movement to keep the pictures constantly interesting, and vocal work with period-appropriate 1930s accents was uniformly strong and clear.  As the actressy Judith, Lucy Peacock turned in a sterling portrayal of an over-the-hill performer who refuses to admit she is over the hill, and refuses to retire from the stage even when she has retired and is at home.  Kevin Bundy did well, too, with the writer husband, David.  Ruby Joy and Tyrone Savage were excellent as the son and daughter, Sorel and Simon Bliss.  In some ways, the comic gem of the household was the maid, Clara, played by Sarah Orenstein.  She's a delight precisely because she is a unique, one-of-a-kind, anti-caricature of the servants' hall, like almost all of Coward's servant characters (no two of them alike).  Orenstein found all kinds of funny tones of voice and body poses to underline her portrayal of this most undignified housemaid.

The house guests are actually the more interesting characters of the script, for me.  Each of them has to serve as a target and punching bag for the family, but each one approaches that fate with a winning air, and a style unlike any of the others.  Sandy Tyrell, the boxer, is played by Gareth Potter as one of those appealing , slightly vacant-headed young men so common in plays of this period.  Cynthia Dale gets a good deal of fire out of the socialite Myra Arundel.  Ijeoma Emesowum is certainly not vacant as the flapper girl, Jackie Coryton, and shows a good deal of spirit.  The most polished character in the play is undoubtedly Sanjay Talmar's portrayal of Richard Greatham, a diplomatist -- Talmar is so polished that his lines practically slide off his tongue, and the insults fired at him slip equally smoothly off his shoulders.

The most genuinely funny moment for me came at the end when the family all fell into simultaneous, fortissimo argument while their four house guests tiptoed exaggeratedly down the stairs and out the front door.

There's a cute comment in one of the programme notes about how Coward never even got past the front hall in this play, but that's misleading.  The action demands a set which is a combination front hall/drawing room/dining room, and designer Douglas Paraschuk delivered the goods.  His two-story tall glass windows as backdrop were breathtaking, as was the staircase sweeping upwards past them -- and that included the trick ninth step up, which characters always had to step over, jump over, or reach over, although precisely what was wrong with it was never quite clear from the actions of those who had first stepped on it.

The front drop which we saw before and between scenes was a lovely group caricature of the Bliss family.  It suited the crazy, unreal tone of the piece to perfection, as did the selection of Noel Coward songs (sung by the Master himself) which were interspersed with instrumental pieces during the pre-show and scene breaks.  What could be more appropriate for this houseful of borderline lunatics than Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun?

Director Alisa Palmer certainly deserves a lot of credit for making this piece lift off as much as it did.  She wrote a detailed explanation for the programme of her reasons for staging Hay Fever, apparently seeing it as a kind of feminist tract by a gay man written several generations early.  Sadly, none of this ever became apparent for me.  I doubt whether I will ever bother seeing a production of this play again -- given the nature of the script, once is quite enough for me.

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