Hay Fever

Although the three earlier versions appear to be lost, this was the fourth filming of Noel Coward's amusing play HAY FEVER (the others dating from 1920, 1938, and 1939). This is one of the countless TV triumphs of the brilliant Cedric Messina, producer and director of this filmed play, who had previously produced 82 episodes of PLAY OF THE MONTH for the BBC and had directed eight of them. Messina was a titan of the old school, by which I mean people of taste. The BBC is now run by nonentities lacking in any taste, ability, or culture, who are paid ludicrously inflated salaries for poisoning the national culture and pursuing their own private and political agendas at public expense. Messina and his friends at the BBC of the 1970s and 1980s kept culture permanently on the boil, and delivered regular doses of uplifting and stimulating drama to a mass public, keeping the tone of British society at a higher pitch, whereas today everything has plummeted below even the lowest common denominator (that ultimate nirvana of all TV managers of the present age, who compete with each other to be the lowest and unworthiest abject grovelers wishing to appeal to yobs and oafs, who are after all their very kith and kin). This production sparkles with poisonous and devastating wit and satire, showing Coward at his most vicious. The production is dominated by the bravura lead performance of Penelope Keith, certainly one of the finest of her career. Despite the need for the character to be over the top, Keith keeps it believable and just stops it from spilling over the edge and becoming ludicrous. What a professional! Despite being only 44 years old at the time, she successfully manages to look older, so that she can moan, as the vain and egocentric character must, at 'getting old, old, old'. Paul Eddington does a marvellous job as her husband. He is primarily known for YES MINISTER and YES PRIME MINISTER, but perhaps his finest work was in the unforgettable and wonderful mini-series THE CHAMOMILE LAWN (1992), made not long before he died. Another sparkler in this film is Phoebe Nicholls as the young daughter, Sorel Bliss. She more or less recreates her most famous character of Cordelia Flyte in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (1981). She shows remarkable insouciance and timing, and it is a pity that her voice was too high-register at the beginning of the film for her words to be properly audible. The sound recordist had a struggle, at which he did not much succeed, to deal with the sound in those complicated shots where someone stands in the foreground while someone else tries to speak in the background, far beyond the reach of any boom mike, and at a time when being 'miked-up' was not always successful. The technical problem with this play is that it is a play taking place in a static interior which the director wishes to make less claustrophobic and stagey by enlarging it beyond the capacity of sound to travel or be recorded properly in 1984. Some voices carry and others do not, primarily the high voice of Nicholls. However, this technical fault is soon forgotten as the lively action and dialogue proceed. The story of the play concerns an affluent 'Bohemian' (meaning eccentric) family of four, the mother (Penelope Keith), the father (Paul Eddington), the daughter (Phoebe Nicholls), and the son (Michael Siberry). The action is entirely set in their home, and in a supporting role Joan Sims plays their maid. Each has separately invited a member of the opposite sex for the weekend without telling the others, so four people unexpectedly turn up, with insufficient food in the house, and much banter about who will be given 'the Japanese bedroom'. The son has invited a significantly older and notorious man-eater, Myra Arundel, sinuously portrayed by Patricia Hodge as a cool vamp. The father has invited a pathetically shy young thing played by Susan Wooldridge, who cries and bleats. Wooldridge has recently appeared as Penny Upminster in TAMARA DREWE (2010, see my review, though I do not mention Wooldridge in it). The daughter invites a constipated and poe-faced diplomat from the Foreign Office (excellently played by Benjamin Whitrow), who quickly falls for the mother, who has invited a young and ardent beau played energetically by Michael Cochrane, now a veteran of 107 titles. He wears a white jacket, a wing collar, and a pink tie, and the costume designer had a lot of fun making him look 1920s-trendy. The daughter wears a flapper dress and looks as cute as can be. But this seemingly harmless and happy family play dangerous games. We eventually realize that they must routinely invite people to be house-party 'victims' of mockery with whom they play teasing games of pretended relationships. When Penelope Keith teases Benjamin Whitrow into kissing her cheek, she immediately says she will tell her husband that their marriage is over, and that she and Whitrow feel undying love for each other. The others behave similarly. It is difficult to know just what Noel Coward's motives were in portraying a family as wickedly and cunningly exploitative in their eccentricity as the Bliss family in this play. Methinks the tongue of the viper licks along the edges of this comic story, and its wit is laced with strong arsenic. Was Coward attacking real people? Or were his visions of family life as dark as this? The women come across the worst. The Bliss family happily lapse into a somnolent complacency and self-sufficiency in between the tricks played on their hapless visitors. The film is amusing, witty, disturbing, and unsettling, all at once, as it was doubtless meant to be by its author. Although the play is thus an enigma, I suggest that its author was as well. I have known several women who knew and so 'adored dear Noel', but how deeply did they look beneath the surface?

The truly awful Bliss family (father David, mother Judith, daughter Sorel, son Simon) have each asked someone down for the weekend that the others don't know about. David, a writer seeking inspiration (played by Paul Eddington) has asked a shy and stammering flapper, Jackie (Susan Wooldridge). Judith, an ageing actress who plays every moment as if it was on the stage (Penelope Keith) has enticed Sandy, who wears flannels (Michael Cochrane). Sorel, a 20s bright young thing, has invited Richard, a diplomat (Benjamin Whitrow). And Simon, idle and intolerable, has asked his older lady friend, Myra (Patricia Hodge).

This meeting of oddballs goes from bad to worse, with a word game falling flat, mind games a la Virginia Woolf by Albee, and eventually, a farcical breakfast/library staging. It is perceptive, frothy, sparkling, and funny, and everyone fits their characters perfectly. A bit of location work also helps with an ever-more waterlogged garden pinpointing the movement of time.

I was so looking forward to this. I came across this just by chance on Youtube and sat down to watch it. After all, it is by Noel Coward, master of the witty word and capable of both dexterity of language and depth of emotion. This is a TV adaptation of what was one of his early stage plays, a comedy that apparently wasn't as well received when it was first staged. After watching this, I can fully understand why.

The jist of the play is centred around the eccentric (and somewhat ironically named) Bliss family, dominated by the matriarch Judith (Penelope Keith), a former actress who longs to be back on the stage. She is disconcerted to discover that her children Sorel (Phoebe Nicholls) and Simon (Michael Siberry) have invited their prospective lovers down to their country estate for the weekend - not least because she has also done the same and there will be no room for them with only the Japanese bedroom available to fit them all in. Both her children are inviting older lovers, Sorel her diplomat boyfriend Richard (Benjamin Whitrow) and Simon his girlfriend, the predatory and posh Myra Arundel (Patricia Hodge). Judith, by comparison, has a younger lover in Sandy Tyrell (Michael Cochrane), but he is in for a shock when he arrives - he doesn't know that she still has a husband, alive, and living in the house still. Paul Eddington plays her writer husband David, a variation on the characters that made him famous, though a little more absent minded, reuniting him with his Good Life co star Penelope Keith. He has a surprise of his own when he announces that he has invited a woman down to judge her for a job interview to be his secretary, Jackie Coryton (Susan Wooldridge), meaning that there will be four new guests for the weekend. Tailing off the list of characters is their maid Clara (Joan Sims), who is left to sort out the dinner arrangements.

When the guests arrive, little do they know what they are letting themselves in for - and neither did I. At first it starts off as a typical Coward play, all witty words and decent humour. But as the play progresses it becomes more bizarre as it goes on, starting with an excruciating parlour game that the family insist on involving the increasingly reluctant guests in and then a plot twist where Sorel's older boyfriend Richard (who insists he hasn't that inclination towards her) ends up kissing Judith, who immediately declares she must leave her husband to him, but how they must keep their relationship secret from her daughter. The poor chap is startled by her dramatic declarations, but when she does the same sort of theatrics upon discovering her daughter Sorel with Judith's young lover Sandy it becomes increasingly wearisome and strange. When her husband David comes in from the garden with Myra Arundel and declares the same thing, it becomes clear this family is not normal - not least to the guests!

By this point I began to find this comedy tiresome. What had started out witty enough becomes a infuriating self absorbed bore, and feels almost insufferably smug about how clever it thinks it is in regarding the Bliss family as people who should be indulged in their "eccentric ways" just because they are wealthy. They become neither amusing or lovable, but wearisome and irritating. I recall watching the Susan Stephen film "Father's Doing Fine" (1952), which was at times an exhausting film to watch with it's eccentric family. But at least it has a plot and conclusion to it - here there seems to be no rhyme or reason to Hay Fever! What is the actual point to this play? You couldn't help but feel sorry for the guests that find themselves trapped in this self indulgent madhouse, with the family using them to play out their own theatrical fantasies. It's not as if I can fault the performances. Both Phoebe Nicholls and Michael Siberry as the Bliss children hold their own admirably against their more experienced elders, such as Patricia Hodge, Benjamin Whitrow and Penelope Keith, who I felt was rather too theatrical as Judith. Susan Wooldridge was sympathetic as poor, shy Jackie Coryton, who wondered what on earth she had let herself in for, while I lament the fact that the wonderful Joan Sims is so underused in this, as she steals the few scenes she is in.

But in the end what started out as vaguely amusing and witty ended up irritating me, and the whole thing seemed an utterly pointless exercise in self indulgence. It's hard to believe that this play was written by a man who would later go on to write such film classics as Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter and This Happy Breed. In one of the few scenes where someone actually snaps and rails against the Bliss family, Patricia Hodge's character Myra sums up everything for me when she says to Judith "I'm not going to spare your feelings or anybody else's. 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 centred egostists and I'm sick to death of you!" I know it's all a matter of opinion in the end, but Myra's sentiments said it all for me. By the end of this I was thoroughly sick of Hay Fever and it's crazy inhabitants.

HAY FEVER is a play written by Noel Coward in the 1920s in which he based his lead character, the flamboyant actress Judith Bliss, on the flamboyant actress Laurette Taylor. The play was successfully launched in London and New York in the mid-1920s and revived again in the 1930s. Usually considered minor Coward, the play has gained steam as the decades have passed until it is now considered one of his best plays. Oddly, no major films have ever been produced. There were a few minor British TV productions in the 1930s and 40s, That being said, a wondrous British TV movie was made in 1984 (still the only filmed production) starring Penelope Keith as the maddening Judith Bliss, a great actress who bemoans aging and is rusticating at her country home with her equally maddening family: her husband novelist and her two grown children. It seems that each has invited a guest for the weekend without telling anyone else. Of course each guest proves to be unsuitable and the weekend goes terribly wrong, reducing the family to endless-yet-witty squabbling. The parlor game they play is very funny.

Keith is center stage as the actress who is likely, at the drop of a hat, to break into a scene from some play. Keith is a master at playing the quicksilver character who can turn from drama to comedy in a tick.

Excellent set opens the "drawing room" comedy, and the costumes are first rate. Keith's gold gown is mesmerizing.

Keith had starred in a West End production, on which this TV version is based. Lots of familiar faces among the co-stars include Paul Eddington, Patricia Hodge, Joan Sims, Benjamin Whitrow, Susan Wooldridge, Phoebe Nicholls, Michael Siberry, and Michael Cochrane.

Another play-based show from BBC Television on the Noel Coward Collection, this one has been remade and broadcast several times in the UK and in the US over the years. This one opens with the Bliss family bickering about where their various invited guests will all sleep. The young flapper-wanna-be daughter Sorel (Phoebe Nicholls) and selfish Simon (Michael Siberry) are the children of Judith (Penelope Keith) and David (Paul Eddington). Joan Sims is Clara, the maid, who must deal with all this confusion. Of course, everything goes wrong, and awkward situations abound at a high-society party, Coward's specialty. This was the final film directed by Cedric Messina, who was also the producer.