JUDITH: You must forgive me for having rather peculiar children.
SOREL: We’re a beastly family, and I hate us… we’ve spent our lives cultivating the Arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and things.
MYRA (furiously): Well, I’m not going to spare your feelings, or anyone else’s. You’re the most infuriating set of hypocrites I’ve ever seen. This house is a complete feather-bed of false emotions—you’re posing, self-centred egotists, and I’m sick to death of you.
SIMON (over his shoulder): Ha, ha!—very funny.
Executive summary
In a country house near Cookham live the Bliss family, father, mother, young adult son and daughter. Without telling the others, they each invite a guest down for the weekend, but behave so selfishly and rudely that after an embarrassing Saturday afternoon, and excruciating Saturday evening, on the Sunday morning all four guests run away while the Blisses are so busy having a massive family row that they don’t notice their departure.
More froth. Having come across the word ‘flippant’ to describe Coward it’s stuck in my mind as the best word to describe his approach. Flippant, sarcastic, lofty, dismissive, it may well have captured the cynicism of the younger generation of upper-middle-class families he portrays, but it makes for tiresome reading.
‘Hay Fever’ is said by some to be Coward’s most perfect comedy. In my opinion a comedy has to be funny, or it at least helps. Coward characters overflow with deliberately silly and frivolous comments which aren’t funny in themselves, but continually signal the facetious flippant mentality which is his schtick.
SOREL: Everybody’s heard of Richard Greatham.
SIMON: How lovely for them.
That strikes me as being schoolboy level and indeed a lot of Coward’s characters behave like children, like spoiled adolescents, have the psychology of sarcastic teenagers. When Sorel (a young woman) tells her sarcastic brother, Simon, that she’s invited a guest to come and stay, Richard Greatham, a chap who works in the Foreign Office, Simon says:
SIMON: Will he have the papers with him?
SOREL: What papers?
SIMON (vaguely): Oh, any papers.
SOREL: I wish you’d confine your biting irony to your caricatures, Simon.
Is this biting irony? No, it’s a mildly amusing bit of banter. And this is characteristic of the way all the characters, and by implication the author, talk themselves up, make grandiose gestures out of what are, in reality, very mundane arguments and misunderstandings. Which is why Coward’s plays have this peculiar quality of making quite a big impact at the time and then later, in memory, feel so empty.
Or else the tone is just camply bitchy. When Sorel asks the maid, Clara, whether she’s put flowers in the Japanese room, where he’s going to be put up, Simon, having taken against this chap Greatly, bitchily comments:
SOREL: You haven’t forgotten to put those flowers in the Japanese room?
SIMON: The Japanese room is essentially feminine, and entirely unsuited to the Pet of the Foreign Office.
SOREL: Shut up, Simon.
This could be delivered as camp bitchiness, but is really teenage sarcasm. It’s mildly distracting but not funny. As the play progressed I realised the most important bit was Sorel’s immediate anger. The point of the play is how quick each member of the Bliss family is to get angry with any of the others. Very self-absorbed argumentative family, that’s the point.
Then there’s the comedy of snobbery pure and simple.
SOREL: Clara says Amy’s got toothache.
JUDITH: Poor dear! There’s some oil of cloves in my medicine cupboard. Who is Amy?
SOREL: The scullery-maid, I think.
JUDITH: How extraordinary! She doesn’t look Amy a bit, does she? Much more Flossie.
This is the familiar caricature figure of the loveably out-of-touch parent or posh bourgeois who has no idea about their own servants. Hilarious.
Act 1. Saturday afternoon
All three acts are set in the same scene, the living room of the Blisses’ house at Cookham, in June.
Simon and Sorel are brother and sister (19), young whimsical and self-absorbed. Just like Florence and Nicky Lancaster in The Vortex, they consider themselves ‘abnormal’ and lament how they suffer for their ‘difference’.
SIMON: It’s no use worrying, darling; we see things differently, I suppose, and if people don’t like it they must lump it.
This is just another way of saying they’re special, which is, of course, what all narcissistic self-absorbed people think. And it is, notoriously, what self-involved theatre people, or ‘luvvies’, think about themselves. Different, special – more sensitive, spiritual, artistic and aware than ‘normal’ people.
And theatre audiences who have paid to attend the theatre have made a fairly obvious agreement that they will find the people on stage in some sense ‘special’, participants in a shaped narrative, otherwise why bother going to the theatre at all?
Actors on stage playing actors claiming the narcissistic attention which (some) actors notoriously think due to themselves – it’s like watching a baby or child in an adult body – this genre or trope has entertained audiences for over a century, and Simon and Sorel’s mother Judith is a prime example. She claims to have retired from the stage, though her children suspect it won’t be long before she takes it back up, because of the addiction to feeling special, to being in the limelight and the centre of attention. She tells us she’s invited a friend to stay this weekend, and goes on to explain:
JUDITH: He’s a perfect darling, and madly in love with me—at least, it isn’t me really, it’s my Celebrated Actress glamour—but it gives me a divinely cosy feeling.
An actress on stage describing how wonderful it is to be adored as an actress on stage. This is what the kids call ‘meta’, meaning ‘self-referential, referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre.’ I think Oscar Wilde’s characters, in plays and stories, constantly refer to playing a part, acting a role, posing, but do it as part of a consciously worked-out attitude to life, explained in great depth in his long essays. In Coward it just feels like a trick and a mannerism.
Anyway, brief summary: Simon is allegedly an artist, Sorel is his quick-tempered sister, mother Judith affects the absent-minded self-importance of a Grande Dame of the theatre, and the father, David, hides away in his study finishing his novel.
The four guests they’ve invited arrive, being:
- Sandy Tyrell, a sporty young chap invited by Judith – ‘He’s a perfect darling, and madly in love with me’
- Myra Arundel, sexy and strong-minded, invited by Simon – according to Judith ‘She’s far too old for you, and she goes about using Sex as a sort of shrimping net’ and calls her a ‘self-conscious vampire’ or vamp – a word just coming into common usage
- Richard Greatham, an older man, iron-grey and tall, ‘a frightfully well-known diplomatist’, invited by Sorel
- Jackie Coryton, small and shingled, ‘a perfectly sweet flapper’ invited by David – ‘she’s an abject fool, but a useful type, and I want to study her a little in domestic surroundings’
The Bliss family have a disconcerting habit of, without warning, dropping into a team performance of plays their mother once performed in. At several points during the weekend they suddenly drop into acting out one of Judith’s great hits, ‘Love’s Whirlwind’ and they’re acting out the climactic scene when the first of the guests arrive.
The guests arrive and are disconcerted to be very cursorily greeted, almost ignored by the Blisses.
MYRA: It’s useless to wait for introductions with the Blisses.
There are various moments of embarrassment. For example Sandy is taken aback when Judith tells him her husband is upstairs. He thought she was a widow. Simon fancies Myra like mad but she’s suave and standoffish. Soon after they’ve arrived urbane Richard and dim Jackie find themselves abandoned by their hosts, and left alone find they have nothing to talk about. Slowly they all realise they’re all there for various types of misunderstanding.
The casual rudeness of the Bliss’s, leaving various guests to work out where to go or try and make conversation, leads up to tea for everyone served by Clara the servant, at which conversation fizzles out as it starts to rain and they’re all stuck indoors with each other.
Act 2. Saturday evening
Everyone’s dressed for dinner. The first half of the act is taken up with an enormous squabble about which party game they should play, with the Blisses snapping at each other while the other guests try to understand what’s going on.
The game breaks up amid recriminations and arguments with David and Judith blaming each other from bringing up the children so badly. The characters break away, David going to his room, the others into the library or out into the garden. This leaves Judith the theatrical mother alone with Richard the mature diplomat and it turns out Richard doesn’t like Sorel at all, it’s Judith he’s in love with. There’s lots of flirting which leads up to him kissing her.
At this she leaps to her feet and melodramatically behaves as if they are having a torrid affair and agonising over how to tell her husband that their life together is over etc. This, I grant you, is very funny. Telling him she needs space to compose herself she pushes Richard out into the garden and preens in the mirror before going into the library. But here she discovers young Sandy the sportsman, who she invited down, locked in an embrace with Sorel.
Once again Judith switches into the role of the betrayed woman, making a Grand Scene.
SOREL: Mother, be natural for a minute.
JUDITH: I don’t know what you mean, Sorel.
Comically, Judith says she will make the Great Sacrifice of giving up Sandy and letting his and Sorel’s love prosper. As soon as she’s swept out, Sorel lights a cigarette and tells Sandy she doesn’t love him. But what about the scene they just had?
SORE: One always plays up to Mother in this house; it’s a sort of unwritten law… her sense of the theatre is always fatal.
They go back into the library leaving the stage empty. This is the setting for the third love scene, this time between the father, David, and wilful Myra. Note how the Blisses are pairing off not with the guests they invited. Musical chairs.
An enormous long scene as they flirt leading up to his taking her hand. She repeatedly tells him to let go and then slaps him. With sixpenny psychology, this leads them to suddenly fall into a passionate clinch. And with arch contrivance, this is precisely when Judith re-enters from her bedroom, coming down the stairs and capturing them in mid-kiss.
Obviously David and Myra are embarrassed but once again this is the pretext for Judith to play the Grande Dame, this time not with a florid burst of hysteria but with quite the opposite, an exaggerated display of Noble Restraint.
JUDITH: Life has dealt me another blow, but I don’t mind.
Cold-eyed Myra sees that this is all part of their family dynamic:
MYRA: You’re both making a mountain out of a mole-hill.
But Judith sweeps on in the part of Noble Self-Sacrificing Wife, saying she will leave the house now it has become too full of painful memories.
JUDITH: October is such a mournful month in England. I think I shall probably go abroad—perhaps a pension somewhere in Italy, with cypresses in the garden. I’ve always loved cypresses.
This is funny, as is the way David completely forgets that he’s supposed to be ‘in love’ with Myra in his admiration for Judith’s performance.
At the height of her display Simon comes running in from the garden and, in the fourth and final reshuffling of the characters’ initial allegiances, announces that he and the brainless flapper Jackie are engaged. And this triggers what, by now I’ve realised, is yet another performance from Judith, this time as The Mother Whose Children Are Growing Up And Leaving Home.
JUDITH (picturesquely): All my chicks leaving the nest. Now I shall only have my memories left. Jackie, come and kiss me.
There’s only one snag, which is that Jackie in no way loves Simon and eventually gets to explain that they had one little kiss then he leapt up and ran off to the house to tell his family. What you realise is that they’re all acting, all the Blisses seize on mundane events and blow them up out of all proportion in order to feed their own sense of the theatrical. Against this Myra is the voice of clear-eyed realism (as Helen is in The Vortex), and angrily tells them the truth:
MYRA: Don’t speak to me—I’ve been working up for this, only every time I opened my mouth I’ve been mowed down by theatrical effects. You haven’t got one sincere or genuine feeling among the lot of you—you’re artificial to the point of lunacy.
So that’s the key to the whole thing. It’s a group portrait of a family who live in their own incestuous over-dramatic theatrical reality.
And to seal the point, as all the characters descend into a huge bickering squabble, Richard the diplomat innocently asks ‘Is this a game’ without realising this is a line from the play the family often perform, ‘Love’s Whirlwind’ and, at a drop of a hat, Judith, Simon and Sorel drop into a performance of the melodramatic final scene while David enthusiastically applauds – leaving the four invited guests puzzled and aghast.
Act 3. Sunday morning
First thing in the morning in the dining room. Clara the servant has set the breakfast things in warming dishes on the side table. One by one the guests come down, Sandy, Jackie, Myra, Richard.
There’s a lot of comic business with Sandy developing hiccups and dim Jackie clumsily trying to help cure them, and then a comic thread where Richard taps the barometer in the hall and it promptly falls off the wall onto the floor and breaks and, mortified, he tries to hide it…
But the thrust of the scene is simple: all four guests agree the Bliss household is a madhouse and they can’t get away soon enough. They agree to pack their bags in a hurry and sneak out to Richard’s car, and this is what they do.
Once they’ve left the Blisses arrive one by one for breakfast. In a minor way they each do something symptomatic of their interests. Judith is gratified to find that she’s mentioned in a newspaper gossip column, Simon has drawn a new caricature which he shows the others to admire, and David comes downstairs excited because he’s completed the last chapter of the novel he’s writing (titled ‘The Sinful Woman’).
Excitedly he starts reading this final chapter to his family. It opens with a description of the heroine (Jane Sefton) driving her car (a Hispano cf Iris Storm’s car in The Green Hat) round Paris. Except that his family interrupt him to point out he’s got the geography of Paris wrong. To be precise they deny that the Rue St. Honoré leads into the Place de la Concorde, while David insists that it does. This escalates into a full-scale shouting match and it is during the family’s flaming argument that their four poor guests, unseen, sneak down the stairs carrying their bags, and out the front door.
The family argument is reaching a climax when the front door slams shut loudly which shuts them up. After a moment’s silence they then fall to criticising their guests and their extraordinary behaviour in leaving without even saying goodbye or thank you.
DAVID: People really do behave in the most extraordinary manner these days…
Thoughts
Taken for what it is, ‘Hay Fever’ is an affable evening’s entertainment, clocking in at an hour and a half, leaving plenty of time for drinks beforehand and supper somewhere nice afterwards. It is a perfect example of theatre as harmless entertainment and part of a charming night out, civilised and amusing.
It’s a kind of standing reproach to all those critics and intellectuals who want theatre to tear the mask off bourgeois society in the manner of Ibsen and Shaw or any of the post 1960s playwrights who see it as their task to question society’s values and address Big Issues. I can see how Coward fans see his work as a welcome antidote to all that, and his frothy emptiness as a statement in its own right.
Books & Boots 