Richard E Grant and Christine Baranski Host Coward's Hay Fever Chaos

Richard E Grant and Christine Baranski lead Noël Coward's Hay Fever at Wyndham's Theatre in London, in a revival of the comedy the Guardian's review describes as a study of clipped social embarrassment.

Grant, the review notes, brings "shock-haired vigour" to the role of a vain novelist forced to welcome his bohemian children's surprise guests. The production stages the weekend from hell that has become one of Coward's best-known and most-performed works — a status the play did not enjoy at the start.

A slow start in 1925

Hay Fever has not always been a smash hit. British critics who caught its West End debut in 1925 found the play amusing enough, but they noted its lack of plot. The first Broadway production fared worse and closed as a flop. A critic for Vogue called it "funny in places" — a phrase that, as the review observes, sounds like the kind of stinging putdown Coward might have written himself.

A century of performances has since proved the play's staying power. Yet its comic effect, the review argues, has always lain less in the words as written than in their delivery.

A family 'artificial to the point of lunacy'

The play is, after all, about a family that is "artificial to the point of lunacy". At its centre stands Judith Bliss, played here by Christine Baranski, a diva who has retired from the stage to take up the role of country hostess.

The plot, such as it is, turns on a classic Coward device. Judith, her husband and their self-consciously bohemian children Sorel and Simon each invite surprise guests for the weekend. The unfortunate attendees find themselves embroiled in a self-serving drama of exquisite embarrassment, staged by hosts who treat their visitors as an audience.

That premise — four members of one household performing at each other while their guests look on in mounting discomfort — is what has kept the play in the repertoire for a hundred years, even as its earliest critics dismissed it as plotless.

The Wyndham's production now tests whether Grant's vigour and Baranski's stage presence can deliver the delivery-dependent comedy that, as the review makes clear, has always been the making of Hay Fever.