Hay Fever

Hay Fever runs at the New Theatre from 10 October – 2 November 2013. By Noel Coward, directed by Rosane McNamara.

When I was in London recently, I was lucky enough to catch one of the final performances of Private Lives at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End, starring Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor. It was the most wonderfully enjoyable show: fizzy and frothy and funny and just gorgeous. When I was thinking about it afterwards, I realised that it was not really that substantial: Private Lives deals with love in some interesting ways, as I discussed in my review of the Belvoir production of the same show last year, but overall, it’s not going to be the show that changes your life, you know? But that doesn’t matter. It is what it is, and this particular production was like a glass of champagne – wonderful and crisp and light and leaving you feeling a bit merry for quite a while afterwards. It was the kind of show that went straight to your head.

What it also was – or, at least, felt like – was effortless. And that is where this production of Hay Fever at the New Theatre falls down. I don’t want to compare this show to the high-profile, high-budget one I saw in the West End – that would be totally unfair – but on this point, I think it’s illustrative. When you can feel the cast trying oh-so-hard? when the wheels are showing? when you can see the sweat beneath the sparkle? Comedy – especially champagne comedies like Coward’s – do not work so well.

Comedy is notorious for being one of the most difficult of the dramatic arts, and this need for effortlessness is, I think, one of the reasons why. Wit isn’t as witty when you can see the witty one working at it. And that is what happens in this production of Hay Fever: it’s funny, but it’s laborious. Coward’s script is so brilliant that it’s still a terribly enjoyable couple of hours at the theatre, but it lacks the fizz and the froth that it really should have.

This is particularly true of the first act. The scenes where the Bliss family – mother Judith (Alice Livingstone), father David (James Bean), son Simon (David Halgren), and daughter Sorell (Jorja Brain) – are talking together before their guests arrive feel like really hard work. The words and the jokes were there, but they didn’t quite make it to the level of “witty banter”. The actors all felt a little uneasy in their skins, especially the younger two. The timing wasn’t quite right (although I should note that this problem was mitigated somewhat as the show progressed). It was still funny, but it was also a bit awkward – especially because I think some of the cast were struggling a little bit with their accents.

The second and the third act pick up a lot. I’m not sure whether the actors managed to get their groove back after a flat start or whether this is a larger problem, but it certainly feels like a different show after interval. The greater stage time allocated to the Bliss family’s houseguests is a big part of this – everything suddenly becomes a lot snappier when the characters are interacting one on one. I’d like to especially commend Tess Haubrich as Myra Arundel, who was fantastic the whole way through the show. She absolutely owned her role and lit up the stage whenever she was on it.

If you go and see this production, I think it would be pretty hard not to enjoy it. It’s difficult not to enjoy Coward, even when you can see the cogs turning. With some tighter direction and some snappier, punchier interaction – and maybe a week’s extra rehearsal? – I think this could be a really great show. As it is, it’s good fun, but it’s not quite champagne.

 

The Young Idea

The Young Idea runs at the Genesian Theatre from May 4-June 8 2013. By Noel Coward, directed by Laura Genders.

Genesian Theatre’s production of The Young Idea is a very enjoyable, if somewhat unadventurous, interpretation of the play that kickstarted Noel Coward’s career. It is the theatrical equivalent of sherbet: frothy, fun, and sweet, if ultimately a little insubstantial.

This play, written when Coward was 22, is the story of siblings Sholto (Lachlan Edmonds-Munro) and Gerda (Anita Donovan). They are the children of George (Matt Jones) and Jennifer (Kerry Day), who have been divorced for a very long time. Jennifer, a novelist, lives in on the continent, while George lives a peaceful life in the English countryside with his second wife Cicely (Dearbhla Hannigan), judiciously ignoring her numerous love affairs with young men, including Roddy (Carlin Hurdis). Sholto and Gerda are determined to reunite their parents, and are prepared to go to any lengths to do so. Given that this is Coward, it is hardly surprising that hilarity ensues.

This is not Coward’s best play by any means, but it is still great fun. From a literary history perspective, it’s fascinating to see the seeds that would one day grow into Hay Fever and Private Lives (see here for my review of Belvoir St's Private Lives last year). George and Jennifer are the prototypes for Elyot and Amanda, two people that can’t stand each other but ultimately can’t stand to be without each other. Coward clearly learned over his career not to mask the truly interesting story – the relationship between George and Jennifer, in this case – behind other, less interesting facades: we do not learn very much about Sholto and Gerda as people during the course of play, other than that they desperately want their parents to hook up again. If we read Sholto and Gerda as the protagonists, The Young Idea basically becomes the Gossip Girl of the 1920s, a drama set against a hyper-privileged society, with Sholto and Gerda as the prototypes for Chuck and Blair, manipulating everyone around them to get what they want. (Thankfully, unlike Chuck and Blair, Sholto and Gerda do not hook up. Given the whole sibling thing, that would be weird.)

Laura Genders has directed a deft, clever production. It would be easy to let the production grow static, relying on Coward’s writing to speak for itself, but that does not happen here. There are some visual gags in here that are screamingly funny – there is one moment with Claud (David Ross) in the first act which I won’t spoil here that is absolutely side-splitting. While this show is not terribly ambitious, it is dynamic. Genders has drawn some great performances from her actors. While I found Edmonds-Munro and Donovan as Sholto and Gerda a little too doe-eyed at times – I wanted to see a bit more of a differentiation in the way they acted around other people versus the way they acted when they were alone – I really enjoyed the performances of Jones, Day, and Hannigan as George and his two wives. Jones was suitably dry, Day cutting in response, and Hannigan’s acerbic portrayal of Cicely was great fun.

The one thing that I did find a little puzzling at times were the costumes – two minor characters appeared to be in deep mourning in the first act for no apparent textual reason. But this is a very minor quibble. The Young Idea is in no way experimental, nor does it push any boundaries, but it is a whole heap of fun. It won’t change your life, but it will make you laugh. I had a great evening seeing it at the Genesian. Recommended.

Private Lives

Private Lives ran at Belvoir St from 22 September-11 November and is now on tour. In Wollongong 14-17 November and Canberra 21-24 November. By Noel Coward, directed by Ralph Myers.

Private Lives is a champagne comedy. Let’s be real. It’s light and frothy and screamingly funny. It’s full of Cowardian bon mots and one-liners that are agonisingly hilarious. Belvoir’s production of it (which I saw twice, once at Belvoir, once at Merrigong) is definitely full of fizz. It’s sharp and snappy and perfectly cast – I mean, Toby Schmitz as Elyot Chase? how was that not going to work? But what I find interesting – and something which I think the Belvoir production highlights – is the darkness percolating below the surface. Beneath the banter of Elyot and Amanda (and, eventually, Victor and Sibyl) is something dangerous, devastating, and deadly serious. Underneath the fun, there’s destruction.

In her 2009 book A Vindication of Love, Cristina Nehring writes:

“I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalised by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired, and unsettled in love. But... I feel new. Ready for the next round.” (p.275)

There are some serious flaws with Nehring’s book which I won’t get into here, but watching Private Lives, I could not help but think of this quote. Nehring subscribes to the view of love articulated by Denis de Rougemont, love as the sublimated desire for death (something I write about a lot in my academic life which I’ve managed to shoehorn into my theatre reviews before – see here). For love – or, more correctly, passion – to flourish, there must be an undercurrent of destruction. Love is not really adoration or veneration. In Private Lives, Sibyl and Victor adore Elyot and Amanda respectively, and that love is nowhere near enough: it is pale, insipid, fruitless. Love is tied to the desire to possess: to want someone so desperately you want to climb inside their skin (which happens almost literally in Private Lives). Elyot and Amanda cannot live with each other and cannot live without each other because they each want to control the other, to dominate, to lead, to possess. Nehring writes that, “theatrics are at the very heart of romance” (p.65), and between these two, there are theatrics aplenty. The entire play is based on the explosive theatricality of their relationship. They love and desire each other so much that they cannot help but want to destroy each other: Elyot’s cut lip and Amanda’s black eye in the third act are potent physical reminders of this.

It was a brave decision by Ralph Myers to leave the domestic violence of Private Lives in the script. (I went along to Belvoir’s Sunday Forum, where he said that when he was preparing to direct the play, a lot of people he talked to advised him that it had to be cut.) Does it pay off or not? I’m not sure. Looking at the play purely as a champagne comedy? Probably not. Both times I saw it, the room went silent when Elyot and Amanda discuss the first time he hit her – not just I’m-not-laughing-at-this-present-moment silent, but oh-holy-shit silent. People going along looking purely for just light fizzy fun will probably find it offputting. I guess whether it works or not depends on how much darkness you want to find in the show. Private Lives certainly doesn’t function as an endorsement of this kiss-with-a-fist style relationship. Elyot and Amanda’s love is consuming, but it isn’t idealised (this is, as it happens, where I think Nehring’s book on love falls down: her overt fetishisation of destruction and inequality). Intellectually, I found it quite interesting. In literary terms, the relationship of Elyot and Amanda is a throwback to love in medieval romance, before the marriage plot in the novel. Their love isn’t domesticated – when they tried to domesticate it, it failed spectacularly. Love is innately individual for them and will not be bound within a social institution. This harks back to Nehring again, who writes that, “Love is always against something as ardently as it is for somebody” (p.103). This kind of thing is the stuff I can – and do – nerdle about all day long. But on a purely visceral level? God, watching two people beat each other up is deeply uncomfortable.

The actual reason I saw this play twice was a) I liked it, but mostly b) I’m really interested in how stuff translates from big city mainstage to different stages on tour. This is something I thought I’d have a lot more to say about than I actually do. The Upstairs theatre at Belvoir and the IMB theatre at IPAC are fundamentally very different spaces – if nothing else, they’re totally different shapes – but this play translated beautifully. I think the cast did take a little while to adjust to the massive IMB theatre: it’s so big that the jokes seem to take more time to reach the back, and the timing at the beginning in the Wollongong performance was a little uneasy compared to when I saw it in Sydney. Their adjustment was swift, however, and the third act was sidesplittingly hilarious, even the second time round. Both Tobies, Schmitz and Truslove, are real standouts. Schmitz’s dry, sardonic delivery is perfect for Elyot’s witticisms; and Truslove is a total comic natural.

This has all been a very long-winded and nerdy way of saying that I really like this play. It made me think a lot more than I was expecting it to – it’s not often I come out of a comedy and smash out 500 words on the Theory of Love™. I definitely think it could make some people very uncomfortable and should maybe come with a trigger warning, but it really is wonderfully performed and absolutely desperately funny. I’m not entirely sure why everyone was spending so much time hanging out in what appeared to be the hotel corridor, but you should go along and see it and work it out for yourself. If nothing else, it totally wins the award for Best Use Of Phil Collins On The Stage Ever!