Playwright Noel Coward was just shy of 25-years-old when he wrote his uproarious comedy of (bad) manners, Hay Fever, in 1924. In a blisteringly productive three days, a precociously talented Coward penned a work that would come to be known as one of the most quintessentially British comedies of the 20th-century. With its razor-edged wit, pungently florid dialogue and an unmistakable foppish eccentricity, Hay Fever is a play that has enjoyed a long and illustrious history in its native Britain, featuring turns by some of the UK's greatest character actors including Penelope Keith, Judi Dench and Felicity Kendall, all portraying the play's irascible matriarch, Judith Bliss. But despite its excellent pedigree north of the equator, there are some inherent challenges in putting on this play Down Under, according to director Lee Lewis.
Following the squabbling exploits of the Bliss family, whose theatrical pretensions and melodramatic short-fuses prove to be a perfectly entertaining domestic powder-keg when a group of guests come to stay for the weekend, it's a show that draws deeply on stereotypes of the post-war British middle-class. However, while there is a common colonial heritage shared between Australia and Britain, the finer details of this historically distinct set-up, from a period when the boundaries of class and social status were beginning to crumble, may not reach out to an Aussie audience as fluently as their British counterparts. "It's a question I've thought about a lot: how much memory is there in the audience now of that type of social dynamic?" Lewis asks. "The comedy can't just come from the fact this family are over the top. It can't just be laughing at the English, because there's a layer of skewering the audience that is at the heart of what Noel Coward's doing. So the challenge comes in finding a way for the audience to be culturally involved with what's happening on stage."
"The comedy can't just come from the fact this family are over the top. It can't just be laughing at the English"
To solve this conundrum, Lewis has sought to imbue her production of Hay Fever with a more familiar cultural hue, giving her interpretation of Coward a reassuringly Australian undertone. This is most prominently felt in the true blue cast Lewis has assembled, starring two of Australias most venerated musical theatre stalwarts (who no doubt know a thing or two about melodramatic theatrical "luvvies"), Simon Gleeson and, in the pivotal role of Judith Bliss, Marina Prior.
Lewis's production toes a fine line between homage and innovation, planting Coward's English rose in Australian soil. "I think maybe even as recently as 15-years ago, we had a lot more British television, there was still a connection to British culture and reference points that would allow an Australian audience to access what Coward is doing in this play. But now we've got a much closer connection to American culture. That Britishness is fading away," Lewis observes. "A production of Hay Fever can't just be about how strange and unfamiliar these people and their behaviours are, because the play simply won't communicate as it should. So, what we're working towards is a complexity of character and a characterisation that allows for nuance, so that we're still playing with the language in nuanced ways, and not just pretending to be Noel Coward-ish."
Even with these innate challenges to negotiate, Lewis insists it's important for texts like Hay Fever to be preserved in our Australian theatres. "Structurally, it's beautiful writing, and I think any chance to see that kind of language on stage is a great thing. But it also provokes young writers; it raises the language bar. I think insofar as preserving and pushing theatre literacy, it's essential for theatre makers and writers to be examining works like Hay Fever. There's also an opportunity to question how doing this work, on a societal level, says about our relationship to that heritage of Britishness. In terms of our colonial past, a lot of young writers are questioning that enormously. But is there something that we want to carry forward from that heritage or is it something we're gradually letting go of? I think that's a fascinating question, and staging a play like this lets us take the temperature of that."
Melbourne Theatre Company presents Hay Fever, 23 Sep — 28 Oct at the Southbank Theatre.
