Above- Tom Conroy as Simon Bliss and Helen Thomson as Myra Arundel. Featured- Heather Mitchell as Judith Bliss and Josh McConville as Sandy Tyrell in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever.
Life is never dull or boring in the Bliss family, for whom all the world truly is a stage. Life has to be lived to the fullest, and every meeting has to end up in a major scene.
Four guests are invited to the Bliss’ family’s country estate for the weekend. It isn’t long into the weekend that these guests discover that they are just the hosts’ playthings, and isn’t long before they start to make plans to escape.
Early last year Imara Savage helmed a highly successful revival of leading Australian playwright Andrew Bovell’s comic masterpiece After Dinner and she displays equal dexterity with her revival of this Coward classic.
Alicia Clements’ eye-catching, elegant design, featuring a large living room space that, via french doors, backs out into a back garden, places us in the anarchic, freewheeling world of the ever playful Bliss family. At its centrepiece is an old fashioned bath used more like a sofa by some of the characters.
Heather Mitchell gives a consummate performance as the outrageous, attention seeking, drama queen matriarch Judith Bliss. Tony Llewellyn Jones plays Judith’s hunched over, doddery novelist husband, David. Harriet Dyer and Tom Conroy are their two brash and bratty progeny.
Josh McConville as the playboy amateur boxer, Sandy Tyrell, Helen Thomson plays pretentious socialite, Myra, Alan Dukes as gentleman diplomat Richard Greatham, and Briallen Clarke as the nervous, shy Jackie are the four guests who find themselves very much at the whim and mercy of their manic hosts.
The ever brilliant Genevieve Lemon shines as Clara, housemaid and Judith’s former dresser, who is sometimes very grudging in providing her services in an increasingly chaotic environment.
The marvellously played out scene that sees Judith announce to all and sundry that she will divorce David and marry Richard after she seductively persuades Richard to kiss her, is on its very own, worth the price of admission.
Larger than life and much funnier, the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Noel Coward’s HAY FEVER is playing the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until Saturday 21 May.