Hay Fever: MTC's Noel Coward production is reliable entertainment


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THEATRE


HAY FEVER ★★★½


Melbourne Theatre Company


Noel Coward comedies at the MTC – from Miriam Margolyes in Blithe Spirit to Private Lives with Nadine Garner – tend to sport starry casts and be reliably entertaining. This chocolate box production of Hay Fever is no exception.


Played out on a lavishly detailed period set, the classic comedy of bad manners delivers us into the clutches of the Blisses – a family so vividly eccentric Coward didn’t need to bother giving them a plot to lose. But who needs a plot, when you can finesse the architecture of farce in a way that transforms style and symmetry into substance?


Despite a giddy premise, Hay Fever is less feather-light than it first appears. Each of the Blisses – retired actress Judith, her spiky novelist husband (Kim Gyngell), their children Simon (Gareth Davies) and Sorel (Imogen Sage) – has invited a guest to their country estate for the weekend, all without telling the others.


A diplomat (Simon Gleeson), a sporty himbo (Drew Weston), a social-climbing vamp (Monica Sayers) and a sweet but vacant flapper (Alexandra Keddie) duly descend, unaware of the folie a quartre that awaits them.


While individually charming, the Blisses turn, as families can, into a collective monster, and the play escalates from a lack of basic courtesy into complete social excruciation, from parlour games and play acting into compulsive histrionics so wacky and off-putting they might have inspired “Get the Guests” in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?


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Naturally the visitors make a quick getaway, though the Blisses are so self-absorbed they fail to notice until it’s too late.


Marina Prior is cannily cast as the retired stage diva whose self-dramatising wings unfurl into and through her children. A crisp and sometimes deliciously silly performance, it’s a pleasure to watch, and capitalises (why wouldn’t you?) on Prior’s vocal might in a dizzy serenade set-piece.


Her children feel warped into toothsome creatures by Judith’s maternal attentions, with Davies’ talent for inhabiting farce shining through his shambolic bohemian artist, and Imogen Sage pitch-perfect as the bored daughter.


Kim Gyngell mightn’t be ideal in a Rex Harrison part, and the guests vary – though the shallow, often giggle-worthy caricature is accompanied by brisk physical comedy, and the quality of the ensemble performance, directed by Lee Lewis with effortless pace and movement and flow, is more than enough to carry the audience over the odd soft spot or missed note.


Woven into harmonious patterns of disharmony from the incomprehensible muck that lurks within every family, this production of Hay Fever lets you sit back, relax and enjoy Coward’s clever creation. It’s jolly good fun.


Article source: http://watoday.com.au/queensland/alleged-whistleblower-cop-rick-flori-to-run-for-election-20170924-p4yw2j.html

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