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Hay Fever (Modern Classics)

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a b Hastings, Chris. "Winston Churchill vetoed Coward knighthood", Telegraph.co.uk, 3 November 2007, accessed 4 January 2009 We are committed to protecting your personal information and to bring transparent about the information we hold about you. Using personal information allows us to develop a better understanding of our patrons.

Our procedures and the technology we use have appropriate safe guards in place to keep information as secure as possible. In 1920, at the age of 20, Coward starred in his own play, the light comedy I'll Leave It to You. After a three-week run in Manchester it opened in London at the New Theatre (renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in 2006), his first full-length play in the West End. [27] Neville Cardus's praise in The Manchester Guardian was grudging. [28] Notices for the London production were mixed, but encouraging. [29] The Observer commented, "Mr Coward... has a sense of comedy, and if he can overcome a tendency to smartness, he will probably produce a good play one of these days." [30] The Times, on the other hand, was enthusiastic: "It is a remarkable piece of work from so young a head – spontaneous, light, and always 'brainy'." [31] Coward in The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1920Anderson, Donald (Spring 2011). "A Hasty Kind of Genius: Noël Coward's Hay Fever". Modern Drama. 54 (1): 45–61. doi: 10.1353/mdr.2011.0002. (subscription required) Other Coward works produced in the mid-to-late 1920s included the plays Easy Virtue (1926), a drama about a divorcée's clash with her snobbish in-laws; The Queen Was in the Parlour, a Ruritanian romance; This Was a Man (1926), a comedy about adulterous aristocrats; The Marquise (1927), an eighteenth-century costume drama; Home Chat (1927), a comedy about a married woman's fidelity; and the revues On with the Dance (1925) and This Year of Grace (1928). None of these shows has entered the regular repertoire, but the last introduced one of Coward's best-known songs, "A Room with a View". [54] His biggest failure in this period was the play Sirocco (1927), which concerns free love among the wealthy. It starred Ivor Novello, of whom Coward said, "the two most beautiful things in the world are Ivor's profile and my mind". [55] Theatregoers hated the play, showing violent disapproval at the curtain calls and spitting at Coward as he left the theatre. [56] Coward later said of this flop, "My first instinct was to leave England immediately, but this seemed too craven a move, and also too gratifying to my enemies, whose numbers had by then swollen in our minds to practically the entire population of the British Isles." [57] When World War Two began, the deeply patriotic Coward attempted to atone for missing the first one – bothering everyone, up to and including Churchill, for a job. He ended up with several: spying for an underground new secret service, running a propaganda department in France, attempting to stealthily influence important Americans to support Britain and enter the war, even holding meetings in President Roosevelt's bedroom. Just a note: Laurette Taylor, by the way, wasn’t entirely happy about being a known model family for Hay Fever. She protested that none of them had been that rude. Glad Coward’s lot was, though. Irresistible, awful, immortal. Leonard Bernstein / Carol Burnett / Rex Harrison / The National Theatre Company of Great Britain / The Negro Ensemble Company (1969)

Coward's first contributions to revue were in 1922, writing most of the songs and some of the sketches in André Charlot's London Calling!. This was before his first major success as a playwright and actor, in The Vortex, written the following year and staged in 1924. The revue contained only one song that features prominently in the Noël Coward Society's list of his most popular numbers – "Parisian Pierrot", sung by Gertrude Lawrence. [54] His other early revues, On With the Dance (1925) and This Year of Grace (1928) were liked by the press and public, and contained several songs that have remained well known, including "Dance, Little Lady", "Poor Little Rich Girl" and "A Room With a View". [54] [180] Words and Music (1932) and its Broadway successor Set to Music (1939) included "Mad About the Boy", "Mad Dogs and Englishmen", "Marvellous Party" and "The Party's Over Now". [54]Alexander Woolcott wrote, "Laura Hope Crews was permitted to give one of the most disastrous performances I have ever seen in all my life". [17] Coward maintained close friendships with many women, including the actress and author Esmé Wynne-Tyson, his first collaborator and constant correspondent; Gladys Calthrop, who designed sets and costumes for many of his works; his secretary and close confidante Lorn Loraine; the actresses Gertrude Lawrence, Joyce Carey and Judy Campbell; and "his loyal and lifelong amitié amoureuse", Marlene Dietrich. [137] Coward’s characters are subject to strict codes of behaviour, their restraint, politeness and decorum reflected in the precision of their language. So much of his humour lies in the contrast between the innocuousness of the sentiment and the clipped violence of the delivery. Here, it sometimes seems only Pauline Knowles’s glacially cool Myra Arundel, arriving in a purple flapper dress and cloche hat, is fully in that world. Her lines hit home accordingly. One day ... a little advertisement appeared in the Daily Mirror.... It stated that a talented boy of attractive appearance was required by a Miss Lila Field to appear in her production of an all-children fairy play: The Goldfish. This seemed to dispose of all argument. I was a talented boy, God knows, and, when washed and smarmed down a bit, passably attractive. There appeared to be no earthly reason why Miss Lila Field shouldn't jump at me, and we both believed that she would be a fool indeed to miss such a magnificent opportunity. [9] Coward (left) with Lydia Bilbrook and Charles Hawtrey, 1911 Coward, Noël (2004) [1932]. Present Indicative – Autobiography to 1931. London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-413-77413-2.

Noël Coward’s effervescent comedy of bad manners – written in three days when he was 24 – is set in a country house in Berkshire. Hay Fever is set in the hall of the Bliss family home. The eccentric Blisses—Judith, a recently retired stage actress, David, a self-absorbed novelist, and their two equally unconventional children— live in a world where reality slides easily into fiction. Upon entering this world, the unfortunate weekend guests—a proper diplomat, a shy flapper, an athletic boxer, and a fashionable sophisticate— are repeatedly thrown into melodramatic scenes wherein their hosts profess emotions and react to situations that do not really exist. The resulting comedic chaos ends only when the tortured visitors tip-toe out the door.When a peer of the realm plans to marry a Hollywood film star, his family are less than enthusiastic. But why should his mother's personal maid be even more implacably opposed to the wedding than his own flesh and blood? After David exits, Judith, Sorel, and Simon continue complaining about how awful the weekend is going to be. Soon, however, Judith announces that she has decided to return to the stage and revive one of her most successful plays, Love’s Whirlwind. Recollecting favorite passages from this drama, she prompts the children to join her in acting out a scene that begins with the cue ‘‘Is this a game?’’ Their reenactment is interrupted when the doorbell rings. The cycle effectively comprised only nine plays: although Coward wrote ten works for the cycle, Star Chamber was dropped after a single performance. [65]

In a study of Coward's plays, published in 1982, John Lahr called Hay Fever "the first and the finest of his major plays". [65] In 2014 Michael Billington wrote of a new production: "I found myself wondering why, 90 years after it was written, Noël Coward's comedy still proves so astonishingly durable. I suspect it is because it combines astute observation with ironclad technique". [66] Adaptations [ edit ] Billington, Michael. "Tonight at 8.30 review – unexpectedly nourishing Noel Coward marathon" and " The play's the thing in a fine Noël Coward revival", The Guardian 11 March 2014 and 11 May 2014 Fiddler on the Roof / Ethel Merman / Richard Rodgers / The Theatre Guild-American Theatre Society (1972) Left alone with Richard, Judith flirts with him, and when he chastely kisses her she theatrically over-reacts as though they were conducting a serious affair. She nonplusses Richard by talking of breaking the news to David. She in turn is nonplussed to discover Sandy and Sorel kissing in the library. That too has been mere flirtation, but both Judith and Sorel enjoy themselves by exaggerating it. Judith gives a performance nobly renouncing her claim on Sandy, and exits. Sorel explains to Sandy that she was just playing the theatrical game for Judith's benefit, as "one always plays up to Mother in this house; it's a sort of unwritten law." They leave. [24] During the 1930s, once he was established by his early successes, Coward experimented with theatrical forms. The historical epic Cavalcade (1931) with its huge cast, and the cycle of ten short plays Tonight at 8.30 (1935), played to full houses, but are difficult to revive because of the expense and "logistical complexities" of staging them. [168] He continued to push the boundaries of social acceptability in the 1930s: Design for Living (1932), with its bisexual triangle, had to be premiered in the US, beyond the reach of the British censor. [167] Chothia comments that a feature of Coward's plays of the 1920s and 30s is that, "unusually for the period, the women in Coward's plays are at least as self-assertive as the men, and as likely to seethe with desire or rage, so that courtship and the battle of the sexes is waged on strictly equal terms". [167] [n 13]Kingston, Jeremy. "Hay Fever at the Rose Theatre, Kingston", The Times, 29 September 2010. (subscription required)

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