Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

Hay Fever The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. Insights is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2011, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print Insights, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover photo: Mary Dolson in Hay Fever, 2002. Contents

InformationHay Fever on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6

Scholarly Articles on the Play Four Characters in Search of an Audience 8

Utah Shakespeare Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: Hay Fever Hay Fever takes place in the comfortable, but untidy home of the charmingly eccentric Bliss family. Judith, the mother, is a retired stage actress for whom all the world is, indeed a stage; David, the father, is a novelist. Their grown children, Simon and Sorel, live at home with them. As the play opens, Simon and Sorel are dallying in the living room, exchanging insults about mutual friends and worrying that their mother is “up to” something. They speculate that she has invited some “dreary, infatuated young man” to the house for the weekend. Sorel is concerned about this possibility because she, herself, has invited Richard Greatham, a proper English diplomat, as her guest for the weekend. Judith comes in from the garden and reveals that she has indeed invited a young man, Sandy Tyrell. Simon adds to the mounting concern and hilarity by mentioning that he too has invited a weekend guest: Myra Arundel. Finally, David comes downstairs from his study and adds one more visitor to the list; Jackie Coryton, a “perfectly sweet flapper.” After more arguments and witty bantering, Judith announces that she has decided to come out of retirement and revive one of her greatest hits, Love’s Whirlwind. As she and the children begin to perform on of their favorite scenes from the play, they are interrupted by the arrival of their guests. In their blithely ill-mannered and unconventional way, the family members greet their visi- tors brusquely and leave them to make acquaintance and fend for themselves. Following dinner, the Blisses and their guests remove to the living room for a charades-like game of “Adverbs,” in which the players attempt to perform an action “in the manner of ” an adverb. Not unexpectedly, the hosts enjoy the game more than their guests. For the Blisses the evening is full of sparkling witticisms and clever quips, but for their guests the game is simply too dazzling, and they are quickly overwhelmed by the speed of the sometimes acerbic proceedings. Once the game is concluded, the family members begin flirtatious liasions with their visitors, but not necessarily with the guest each invited. Judith gets cozy with Richard. Sorel ducks into the library with Sandy. Simon and Jackie take a walk in the garden. And Judith discovers David and Myra together, giving ample opportunity for more dramatics from the aging actress. The evening draws to a rollicking close as Judith, quite carried away and egged on by the family, reprises scenes from Love’s Whirlwind, much to the horror and consternation of the four houseguests. The next morning, Jackie and Sandy reach the obvious conclusion that they are dealing with a family of lunatics, a family that escaped normalcy years ago. The four beleagured visitors band together, decide to depart for London in Sandy’s car and hasten to make their escape. Meanwhile, the Blisses gather downstairs for breakfast. David tries to read the final chapter of his novel, The Sinful Woman, to his family but is soon embroiled in an argument with Judith about the geography of Paris. Simon and Sorel cannot help but join the debate, and eventually the whole family is once again at each others’ throats. The guests use this moment of pandemonium to slip quietly away. The oblivious family settles down to enjoy its breakfast, Judith once again announces her plans to return to the stage, and David continues reading The Sinful Woman.

4 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: Hay Fever Judith Bliss: David Bliss’s wife and Sorel and Simon’s mother, Judith Bliss is a recently retired actress, although she still loves to act and keeps insisting she will return to her craft. She invites Sandy Tyrell as a weekend guest. David Bliss: Judith Bliss’s husband and Sorel and Simon’s father, David Bliss is a novelist of some acclaim. He invites Jackie Coryton as a weekend guest. Sorel Bliss: Judith and David’s daughter, Sorel Bliss is nineteen years old and bored with most of life. She invites Richard Greatham as a weekend guest.Characters: Hay Fever Judith and David’s son, Simon Bliss is a would-be artist. He invites Myra Arundel as a weekend guest. Myra Arundel: Simon’s invited houseguest Richard Greatham: Sorel’s invited houseguest, a proper English diplomat Jackie Coryton: David’s invited houseguest, “a perfectly sweet flapper” Sandy Tyrell: Judith’s invited houseguest, a young boxer Clara: The housekeeper

Utah Shakespeare Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: Noel Coward Noel Pierce Coward was born on 16 December 1899. His family on his father’s side was very talented musically, and they helped nurture the natural virtuosity of the child, instilling in him a lifelong love of music. Also, his mother took him to the theatre every year on his birthday, and, as he grew older, he found these junkets more and more fascinating and upon returning home would rush to the piano and play by ear the songs from the production he had just seen. He made his first public appearance, singing and accompanying himself on the piano, at a concert held at Miss Willington’s School. Though obviously a very talented child, Coward’s precocity did not carry over to his formal education. At best, his schooling was sporadic. He was indulged by his mother, who became the stereotypical stage mother during his early years, and it was at his mother’s insistence that he began attending Miss Janet Thomas’s Dancing Academy in addition to his regular school in London. Soon, Miss Thomas’s school usurped the position of importance held by traditional academic fare, and Coward became a child performer. Coward’s first professional engagement, and that which launched his long career, was on 27 January 1911 in a children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theatres. He was featured in several productions with Sir Charles Hawtrey, a light comedian, whom Coward idolized and to whom he virtually apprenticed himself until he was twenty. It was from Hawtrey that Coward learned comic acting techniques and playwriting. At the tender age of twelve, Coward met one of the actresses who would help contribute to his overwhelming success, Gertrude Lawrence; she was then fifteen and a child performer as well. The acting team of Coward and Lawrence would become synonymous with polished, sophisti- cated comedy during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Coward began his writing career when he was sixteen by writing songs and selling them for distribution. He turned his hand to playwriting when he was seventeen and found that he was very good at writing dialogue. By 1919, his play I’ll Leave It to You was produced in the West End with Coward in the leading role. One of the idiosyncrasies of Coward’s writing is that often he wrote “whacking good parts” for himself or for people he knew. Some of his best plays are essentially vehicles for his own talents or those of Gertrude Lawrence and later of the Lunts. I’ll Leave It to You met with moderate success, and Coward received great praise from critics for his play-writing abilities. Coward went to New York for the first time in 1921 and arrived virtually penniless; however, although he may have begun the 1920s in penury, his position as the most popular playwright in the English theatre became secure during this decade. In 1924, The Vortex, Coward’s most important serious play, was produced in London. The years from 1928 to 1934 were regarded by many as Coward’s “golden years.” His string of successes include This Year of Grace, Bitter Sweet, Private Lives, Cavalcade, Words and Music, Design for Living, and Conversation Piece. In 1941 he wrote the record-breaking Blithe Spirit, which ran for 1,997 performances in London. After World War II, Coward fell from grace with many critics, who regarded him as being past his literary prime. However, by the late 1950s, audiences were once again in love with him. His plays, revues, and nightclub appearances were extremely successful. The critics, however, remained vitriolic, but their rancor failed to dim the enthusiasm of the general theatre-going pub- lic, which clamored for more Coward plays. On January 1, 1970, Coward was honored by the queen as a knight bachelor for services ren-

6 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 dered to the arts. In the same year, he was awarded a special Tony Award by the American theatre for distinguished achievement in the theatre. In 1972, he received an honorary doctor of letters from the University of Sussex. Coward died of a heart attack in Jamaica on 26 March 1973, bringing to an end a career of more than sixty years in the theatre.

Utah Shakespeare Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Four Characters in Search of an Audience By Daniel Frezza “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “An actor, of course. . . . There’s nothing as good as the theatre.” The question was from a fellow child actor and the answer from the ten-year-old Noel Coward (Micheal MacLiammoir, Enter a Goldfish [London, Thames & Hudson, 1977], 69). It was the foundation of his life and of most of his work, particularly of the earliest of his best plays, Hay Fever. Hay Fever’s premiere crowned a year in which Coward’s fame burst like a rocket over London’s West End. On December 16, 1924, his twenty-fifth birthday, he opened in The Vortex, the play that made him a sensation both as actor and playwright. By mid-1925 he had four shows running in London including Hay Fever. With Private Lives and Blithe Spirit it went on to become one of the most often-revived British comedies of the twentieth cen- tury (Cole Lesley, Graham Payn & Sheridan Morley; Noel Coward and His Friends [New York, Morrow, 1979], 69). Coward himself directed one revival in 1933 and another highly acclaimed revival at Britain’s National Theatre in 1964—the first time the National revived a work of a living playwright (Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995], 485). Coward wrote Hay Fever in about three days (Noel Coward, Present Indicative [New York: Doubleday, 1937], 179). Such speed, typical of his early work, was possible in part because he used established forms, situations, and character types he knew thoroughly, and especially because of his acute powers of observation. Harold Pinter (one of the few contempo- rary serious playwrights whose work Coward admired) saw that they shared a desire to express “objectively and as lucidly as possible what was actually taking place in any given context” (Hoare, 458). Coward’s ability to see himself and others clearly is one of the principal reasons his comedies endure—that and his ability to mine the humor in what he saw. For the Bliss family in Hay Fever he found a ready-made model. In 1921 he spent several months in New York, absorbing the energy of the city and American theatre and trying to interest producers in his scripts. His theatrical connections got him invited to Sunday eve- ning parties given by the great American actress Laurette Taylor and her husband, Hartley Manners, author of Peg O’ My Heart, in which Laurette had a tremendous success. (In the 1940s she won still greater acclaim as Amanda in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.) Coward became a favorite, often arriving in the afternoon to play the piano, staying for dinner (extremely welcome since he was almost penniless) and the evening gathering of celebrities. He recalled that they played “often acrimonious games, owing to Laurette’s abrupt disapproval of any guest . . . who turned out to be self-conscious, nervous or unable to act an adverb or an historical personage with proper abandon.” (Coward, Present Indicative, 135) Early in 1924 Coward returned to New York and again frequented the Taylor-Manners home. A few months later he wrote Hay Fever. It was inevitable, he said, that someone would use their eccentricity in a play and he was grateful to Fate that no one thought of it before he did. (Coward, Present Indicative, 136) Hay Fever opened on June 8, 1925, at the Ambassador’s Theatre and ran for 337 perfor- mances (Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, Theatrical Companion to Coward [New York, MacMillan, 1957]). Taylor’s daughter wrote that “when word drifted across the Atlantic that Hay Fever was supposed to be an intimate picture of the Manners family, Laurette was hurt.” After seeing the New York production she found it hard to forgive Coward. “’None of us,’ she declared emphatically, ‘is ever unintentionally rude’” (Marguerite Courtney, Laurette

8 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 [New York: Rinehart, 1955], 261). The line could have come straight from Coward’s type- writer. One can understand Taylor’s sensitivity at seeing herself and her family on stage, but Coward’s long-time assistant, Cole Lesley, observed that Coward “had written about them all and the fun they had given him as he always remembered them: with affection” (Lesley, Remembered Laughter [New York: Knopf, 1976], 62). Indeed, he subjected himself to similar treatment in the role of Gary Essendine in Present Laughter (1939). Coward was too clear-sighted to be always affectionate toward his colleagues (or himself ). “What fascinates me about acting is when a beautiful, talented actress can come on stage and give a performance that makes your blood curdle with excitement and pleasure, yet she can make such a cracking pig of herself over where her dressing room is or some such triviality. . . . Intelligent actors never do that, but then they’re seldom as good as the unintelligent ones. Acting is . . . a gift that is often given to people who are very silly as people. But as they come on to the stage, up goes the temperature.” (Hoare, 221) The Bliss family consists of Judith, a retired actress itching to return to the stage; her husband David, a novelist; their son Simon, an artist; and daughter Sorel who, perhaps signifi- cantly, possesses no specific artistic talent though she can certainly hold her own in playing up to her mother. Sorel is aware that their slap-dash manners can be devastating to others and tries to reform, but in the end habit wins out. They all at some point force their weekend guests to be audience/participants in wonderfully funny improvisations on stock dramatic situations. Their goal is not to “get the guests” but to exercise their imaginations. As David explains in Act 2: “The only reason I’ve been so annoying is that I love to see things as they are first, and then pretend they’re what they’re not” (Noel Coward, Hay Fever (in Three Plays by Noel Coward) [New York: Dell, 1965], 160). Critic John Lahr used the phrase “comedy of bad manners” to describe Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe Spirit (Coward the Playwright [London: Methuen, 1982], 5). The Blisses make no bones about using people. They accept their egotism as part of their talent and don’t try to hide it. But their vitality and humor redeem them. “To be interesting, to abhor dullness, to disdain normality, . . . to worship accomplishment are the rules which govern the Blisses’ manners.” (Lahr, 45 48) Their lack of conventional civility may be unsettling but they give their guests something valuable in its place. As Richard says in Act 2, “I never realize how dead I am until I meet people like you” (Coward, Hay Fever, 151). The Blisses don’t play favorites: they treat each other just as rudely as their guests. The revi- talizing effect Richard feels evidently works on them as well. After a hilarious final scene of all- out squabbling among themselves, they settle down amicably to breakfast as David reads from his new novel. Judith and her family (and, of course, Coward himself ) put into entertaining practice Jaques’s line from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage . . .” P.S.: The Adverb Game is great fun. See the show to learn how it’s done then try it at home.

Utah Shakespeare Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880