Hay Fever

Hay Fever drops four weekend guests into a country house where the family that invited them has no intention of being polite. Each Bliss has asked someone down without telling the others, and by Saturday afternoon the visitors have worked out that they are not company so much as raw material.

Judith Bliss is a retired actress who retires roughly once a week; her husband David is finishing a novel; their grown children Simon and Sorel have inherited the family habit of treating conversation as performance. The guests arrive expecting flirtation and a quiet weekend. What they get is a household that improvises melodrama at the dinner table, borrows one another's admirers on a whim, and drops the scene the moment it stops being entertaining.

Noel Coward wrote the comedy in 1925 and it reached the stage the same year, establishing him as a writer of manners with the manners taken out. He built it without a plot in any conventional sense: no secret is uncovered, no lesson is learned, nothing is resolved. The engine is four outsiders discovering, across one weekend, that they are outnumbered.

The pleasure is in the timing. Coward writes overlapping talk, sudden changes of register, and a final morning in which the family argues over a detail in David's manuscript while the guests gather their bags and slip out of the house unnoticed. Played straight, the cruelty lands as comedy, because the Blisses are never quite aware of being cruel.

The joke has aged well. A family that treats real feeling as a rehearsal is always funny to everybody except the people trapped in the room with them, and Coward gives the trapped ones just enough dignity to make the trap worth watching.